‘The Better Sister': Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks on their ‘fun partnership' and the ‘satisfying' killer reveal

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6 days ago

Jessica Biel tells Gold Derby she couldn't have been more "excited" to find out who would be playing her sister on Prime Video's The Better Sister. "Me, too!" echoes Elizabeth Banks. In addition to playing estranged siblings Chloe (Biel) and Nicky (Banks), who are forced to come together after someone they know is murdered, the actresses both serve as executive producers under showrunner Regina Corrado. The murder-mystery limited series is based on the 2019 novel by Alafair Burke.
"These are hard characters," Biel tells us (watch the full interview above). "These are challenging roles. You want to know that you have a partner who you can trust and who you know is going to bring it every day.
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"And I believed that we were sisters," Banks chuckles. "I believed it was possible, and that I was the big sister, which I am in real life. It just felt very correct. You know when you're being well cast, and I felt that we were both being really well cast, and that it was going to be a fun partnership, which it was."
All eight episodes of The Better Sister will debut on May 29, so we want to know: Are the actresses binge-watchers, or do they prefer to space out their content?
Biel declares, "I'm a binger, but sometimes I don't have the time to binge all that I want to binge, so I do go in chunks. I would definitely be one of those people up all night long till 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. watching everything, if I could."
"I get, like, actually mad if I can't binge the show," Banks chimes in. "I do love a weekly drop, for our industry and for the culture. And there are things where I do want to sit with it for a minute before I get the next one. But, in general, if something's coming and I don't get them all, I'll wait and then I'll watch them in a couple days."
They theorize that the reason murder-mysteries are so popular right now with viewers is because, "We're all mysteries to ourselves, [and] the audience is fully involved because they're doing the assessing and trying to figure it out, while it's all unraveling right in front of them."
While Biel was "shocked" with the ultimate reveal of the killer in The Better Sister, Banks felt differently. "I was excited that it could have been anyone, and at the same time, I think it was the exact right person," she states. "That felt very satisfying to me."
Prime Video
Working with Kim Dickens as the detective was "a dream," raves Banks. "We're in love! Except she's married, and so am I. So, it's a platonic love. We have a great dynamic in the show, and we really lived it in real life. It was summer in New York, and we were having a fling," which included carpools, dinners, and Broadway shows.
Crossing her arms and fake pouting, Biel chimes in, "I was kind of jealous of the relationship. No big deal. I'm still harboring that. I want to get invited to the fling!"
Corey Stoll, who plays Adam, Chloe's current husband and Nicky's former one, has a "sophisticated" and "academic" personality when the cameras aren't rolling, the actresses claim. And Biel even got to meet his "fun dad guy" persona recently when all of their kids were hanging out together.
Biel opens the show wearing an iconic white dress covered in blood, and she laughs, "There's always something really interesting about being covered in blood. I feel like I do a lot of that in my work. There's a weird combination of things that happen to you. But specifically, that dress was chosen for that reason — that stark white color and that bright red color."
Also in our exclusive video interview, Biel and Banks talk about playing characters that are haunted by past traumas, what it was like physically fighting each other in the courtroom hallway, and what it would mean for the Emmy Awards voters to embrace The Better Sister. Biel is a former Emmy nominee for The Sinner (2018) and Banks received bids for 30 Rock (2011 and 2012) and Modern Family (2015).
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