‘The Better Sister’ Stars Jessica Biel And Elizabeth Banks Reveal Their Real-Life Sisterly Bond
When Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks signed on to play siblings in Prime Video‘s limited series The Better Sister, they felt an immediate familial-level connection.
“It was very natural,” Banks said during a panel discussion Sunday at the Deadline Studio at Prime Experience. She joked with Biel, “I just started sh*tting on you pretty quickly, and then you took it, and then you gave it back a little. And then we just were like, ‘This is what it’s supposed to be.’”
Watch the conversation here, and scroll down for a photo gallery of the event.
The Better Sister, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Alafair Burke, follows Biel’s highflying and successful character Chloe as she reels in shock following the murder of her husband Adam (Corey Stoll)’, while caring for his teenage son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan). Chloe’s life goes from bad to much worse when the authorities call her estranged, recovering addict sister Nicky (Banks) — who also happens to be Ethan’s birth mother and Adam’s first wife.
“With my own sisters,” Banks said, “there are very few things that they could do where I would never want to talk to them again. Sleeping with my husband probably is one of them.”
Co-showrunners and executive producers Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado, also speaking on the panel, found the story really spoke to their interest in family dynamics. Milch said, “The second we read it, we felt like, ‘Well, we’ve got to do this.’ It really grips you in that way. I think both Regina and I are so drawn to stories about family, about sisterhood, and this idea of what does it mean to have different experiences of your parents? How does that determine who you are in the rest of your life?”
Biel credited Corrado and Milch with creating an atmosphere on set where she and Banks, who are also executive producers, could bring collaborative input to their roles. “There was so much to mine, from the amazing scripts to the book,” Biel said. “Then there was nothing but an open channel of collaboration. Anything that we felt that we wanted to add or adjust or, ‘this feels more me,’ or, ‘this doesn’t feel quite authentic to what I’m trying to do with Chloe,’ or what Elizabeth was doing with Nicky. Everything was allowed. Sometimes we would argue about what we thought, and it was also nutritive to the experience… So, the collaboration was just top level, top-notch. Everything was acceptable to talk about. There were no bad ideas.”
One of the key factors for Banks in building her character was Nicky’s attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “I’m honored to have had access to AA,” she said. “I’ve been to meetings, I’ve been to Al-Anon. I have friends and family who work that program whose lives are really helped by it. And I felt a responsibility to represent it fully. I truly think it’s an incredible program, but what it gave to the character was, I knew from how it works, that you have to own all your bullsh*t when you go through that program. So, if she was committed, which I believed that she was, to a daily decision to stay sober and really needing these meetings, that it meant that she had put out into the world her own trauma already. She’d done the work that Chloe had not done.”
Regina Corrado, Olivia Milch, Jessica Biel, and Elizabeth Banks
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Jessica Biel
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Elizabeth Banks and Jessica Biel
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
The Better Sister is a female-led story — also starring Lorraine Toussaint and Kim Dickens in prominent roles, alongside Matthew Modine as Adam’s boss — and it is also a female-led production with female department heads. Biel said this resulted in a very cohesive experience. “Everyone was very humble to, ‘What does it need? What does it need to be the best possible product?’ And if that means cutting out all my lines, cutting me out of the scene, cutting her out, it doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter. Nobody cared about that. It was a macro view of what we were doing and a much bigger look of like, ‘Oh, this is the group mentality all moving in the same direction.’ And we had a lot of chai and snacks.” She noted that there was also “so much ice cream.”
Corrado added, “I never thought about it as all women. I just thought, ‘These are professionals that we’re so lucky to work with.’ And then everyone points it out and you’re like, ‘Wow, look at that.’”
“We love dysfunction,” Corrado joked. “I think the family stuff was always in the forefront for us. That was always what drove the train. And a lot of the work that we do is very personal. It may not come out, and we can channel it into the characters, but we are extremely honest with our own damage and our own journey. And I think that that was a very big part of this process.”
For Milch, the show is, in basic terms, about “two sisters diverged in the woods, brought back together by murder.” But at its heart it’s about truth and connection. “The real story of the show is how do they find each other again. In truth, not in the lie, not in the illusion that they are different, but actually that they are one. And what does that mean to find that hope and love and forgiveness, despite everything you’ve done to each other? And for us, I think that was always the guiding line.”
All episodes of The Better Sister will be available to stream on Prime Video on May 29.
