The regrettable 1998 movie Elizabeth Banks wants to delete from history: “I’d better go to drama school”
It says something about how well Elizabeth Banks did with a first-time directing effort on Cocaine Bear back in 2023 that it’s probably what she’ll do next behind the camera that most people are looking forward to, rather than in front of it.
Because that movie was genuinely something a bit different, completely unhinged obviously, but a gory, funny, thrilling monster movie that took one of the more improbable Hollywood pitches (wild grizzly bear does a load of stolen blow, goes on the rampage) and actually pulled it off without it descending into straight-to-streaming nonsense, instead bringing in almost $100million at the box office.
While we wait for a Cocaine Bear 2, which Banks says she is interested in doing, we also have to sit idly while she decides on what her next directing project will be, because at the moment, only a solitary episode of an as-yet not-in-production series called Red Queen is listed under her name.
But acting-wise, she’s doing plenty, most recently a literally tiny role in The Miniature Wife alongside Matthew Macfadyen, a kind of sci-fi rom-com in which Banks shrinks to six inches tall, which, let’s face it, could actually be quite handy if you lived in a really small flat or something. It has gone down reasonably well with critics who are praising Banks’ performance, and it marks a second series in as many years for her after she starred opposite Jessica Biel in The Better Sister on Prime Video.
Banks has always been pretty prolific though, all the way back to the late 1990s when she made her debut in an independent movie that she would, in all honesty, prefer to forget entirely, as she told Slate, explaining: “Really early on, I did this one film – I think it’s called Surrender Dorothy, I’m not even sure anymore – and I just remember I had met the guy who was going to be the lead in the movie and then, right before we started shooting, that guy got a ‘real job’, and went to do some real job.”
She added, “And the writer/director played the lead role as well because there was no one else to do it! And I thought, ‘I’d better go to drama school and learn how to never have this job again.’”
That movie was indeed called Surrender Dorothy, and a spot of research reveals it was a dark comedy shot entirely in black and white that Roger Ebert described as ‘a bizarre journey into sexual obsession’, which may well explain why Banks is actually credited on the film as ‘Elizabeth Casey’ (fun fact, her real name is actually Elizabeth Mitchell, Banks is a stage name). Either way, it disappeared without a trace, and Banks went on to make several mainstream films in quick succession, including Samuel L Jackson’s Shaft reboot, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and the 2002 Guy Ritchie-Madonna travesty Swept Away.
Her breakthrough role was really the Judd Apatow comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin with a then-relatively unknown Steve Carell, which marked the second of her movies with frequent collaborator Paul Rudd. Since then, she’s had two decades of success, probably best known for her flamboyant performance as Effie Trinket in four Hunger Games movies.
Her most critically-lauded performance, meanwhile, came in 2014’s Love & Mercy, a biopic about the late Beach Boys genius Brian Wilson in which Paul Giamatti and John Cusack also put in appearances.
