Skincare Star Elizabeth Banks on How She Keeps Her Fans Guessing

Throughout her career, the one consistency for Elizabeth Banks is that her fans shouldn’t anticipate what she’ll do next. While her earlier efforts leaned heavily in the comedic realm, such as Wet Hot American Summer, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, she’s also had genre projects like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, Slither, and The Hunger Games franchise on her resume. Banks throws only more wrenches into the works when she steps behind the camera, as she’s offered genre-bending projects like Charlie’s Angels and Cocaine Bear. The actor stars in the upcoming neo-noir Skincare, whose storyline has as many twists and turns as her creative efforts. Skincare lands exclusively in theaters on August 16th.

“A decade ago, I was really struggling with a brand, which is something that this character, Hope Goldman, struggles with, because I had people who knew me from comedy, like 30 Rock and 40-Year-Old Virgin, who were like, that’s what they wanted from me,” Banks shared with ComicBook of her diverse career. “It was like, ‘You’re the cute blonde, you’ve got to be in the comedies. Do those movies.’ And then I had people who knew me from Seabiscuit and the dramas that I was doing, some of the smaller, independent films that I was making, like Call Jane, and I thought, ‘Oh man, I’ve got to figure out … If I don’t check a box, nobody knows who I am,’ and I felt like I was actually losing out on work because people were like, ‘Well, no, but she doesn’t really do that.’ Then someone else will say, ‘Of course she does.’ It was confusing.”

She continued, “Now I think that, through the persistence of my career, the brand that I am is exactly what you’re saying. I’m here to surprise you. I have created enough trust with the audience. I hope that they just know I’m here to entertain them, and I’m going to do it on every level, and I’m going to do it in every genre, and I’m going to do it at all times. That is what I care most about, is that I connect to my audience and that people can trust me to just do as you say so sweetly at the beginning, which is just deliver, and that’s what I’m here to do and surprise them. I think people want to be surprised by me now. So now I’m struggling with, like, ‘Oh God, how will I surprise them next?’” 

Skincare is described, “Famed aesthetician Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks) is about to take her career to the next level by launching her very own skincare line, but her personal and work lives are challenged when rival facialist Angel Vergara (Luis Gerardo Méndez) opens a new skincare boutique directly across from her store. She starts to suspect that someone is trying to sabotage her reputation and business, and together with her friend Jordan (Lewis Pullman) she embarks on a mission to unravel the mystery of who is trying to destroy her life.”

While Skincare was based on a real-life incident, Banks admitted that, while she informed herself of the situation, she looked towards other influences on her depiction.

“Of course, I did read the article eventually when the director told me that it was ripped from the headlines of this true-life story,” the actor confessed. “Cocaine Bear is ripped from the headlines of a true-life story. So we were very fictionalized, and I had already, at that point, based the character on many other women. Frankly, the milieu of the time period, I base this on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in terms of the look and the desperation and the sense of control and power that I just felt like, ‘Oh, that’s the kind of woman that Hope Goldman was.’ I feel like if she had a rich husband, she definitely would’ve tried to be on that TV show, so that was more what I was interested in.”

She added, “I’m glad it was not a real person, that we were never trying to make it a real person. It was wholly Hope Goldman, and I was able to imbue her with a lot of different references, which I loved doing, and I had them all on different walls depending on whether I was in the costume department or the hair and makeup department. We had a lot of fun figuring out who she was supposed to look like and who she was supposed to act like.”

Keeping in line with developing surprising projects, 2019 saw the announcement that Banks was developing The Invisible Woman, a project inspired by the 1940 screwball comedy of the same name. Banks admitted how, after the success of Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man in 2020, Universal Pictures is more invested in continuing that series but that she hasn’t given up hope of bringing her project to life.

“What happened was they made an Invisible Man movie, and they’re making another one,” Banks confessed. “So I think Universal wants to see that through. I’m really interested in the idea that we have, and it is still there, but it’s not something I’m actively working on in this moment in time. I’m making a television show right now. Then I’ve got to go make another television show, and then we’ll see what the heck we’re going to do.”

Skincare lands exclusively in theaters on August 16th.

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