🎧 Secrets, Sexy, Messy: Elizabeth Banks & Jessica Biel's Twisted Sisters
The actresses and team behind Prime Video's 'The Better Sister' tell me about the show's unhinged twists and choice '90s needle drops
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“I could do a sexy, messy, sloppy drunk,” insists Jessica Biel, talking about the kinds of roles she wants to play. “I want to do a sexy, messy, sloppy drunk.” She turns to her co-star, Elizabeth Banks. “But unfortunately, not as good as you.”
That’s a sisterly dynamic for you, and one that’s at the heart of Prime Video’s limited series The Better Sister, a twisty murder mystery in which Biel and Banks star as a pair of estranged sisters with some serious family drama behind them.
Though both are well-regarded actresses and powerful behind-the-scenes creatives — each is among the show’s executive producers — their on-screen characters could not be more different. Biel’s Chloe is a high-powered magazine editor whose controlled life is best summed up by her “fuck-ass bob.” As Nicky, the 51-year-old Banks plays the sexy, messy, sloppy drunk that Biel dreams of, while also being a character with much more depth than it might initially seem.
During our conversation in front of an L.A. audience for this special Prestige Junkie live, Biel, 43, talks about how she initially thought she was being asked to play Nicky but relished the chance to become Chloe as her careful life unravels. “ I understand how she presents a certain way, for everyone to be like, ‘Wow, that’s a nice-looking life,’’’ says Biel. “And then secretly, there are other things happening. I think everybody understands that, too.”
Banks, meanwhile, drew on her own Irish-Catholic roots growing up in Boston to play Nicky, a character who never quite feels at home in her sister’s rarefied world. “I remember trying to give my mom a cashmere sweater, and she was like, ‘That is too fancy. I will not wear that ever,’” Banks says with a laugh. “Like, that’s where I’m from.”
It was up to co-showrunners Regina Corrado and Olivia Milch to sort out the many twists of the show’s mystery, adapted from Alafair Burke’s best-selling novel. But as they say in our panel discussion, they too were drawn in by the story’s complex family dynamics, particularly when the series flashes back to Chloe and Nicky’s childhood. “The thing I really connected to immediately was this idea that siblings get different versions of their parents, and that really affects your identity,” says Milch, 36, whose father, David Milch, is the creator of iconic TV shows Deadwood and NYPD Blue. “My dad got sober when I was 10, and my brother was 13 and my sister was 15. And we all have very different ideas and experiences of what our childhood was like, and we had different levels of anger about that, and frustration, and how we carried that into adulthood. And that felt like, ooh, that’s real.”
In our conversation, which you can hear on today’s special bonus episode of the podcast, Milch and Corrado join Biel and Banks to go deep on the emotional resonance of the series, but also the surprising dashes of humor that make it such a compelling watch, including pitch-perfect ’90s needle drops and well-deployed familial insults. Hear it all on today’s episode, and don’t go anywhere — we’ll be back tomorrow with another bonus episode, with another set of collaborators who feel like family.
