Wanted: Lead role for a smart actress
LOS ANGELES -- She played Jeff Bridges's beautiful wife in ``Seabiscuit," a vain lout's beautiful manic girlfriend in ``The Baxter," the lustful would-be girlfriend in ``The 40-Year-Old Virgin," the beautiful school teacher wife in the sci-fi B movie spoof ``Slither," and Leonardo DiCaprio's beautiful bank clerk girlfriend in ``Catch Me If You Can." In ``Invincible," her new movie about a 30-year-old bartender (Mark Wahlberg) who joins the Philadelphia Eagles, Elizabeth Banks plays -- no surprise -- the Beautiful Girlfriend.
Not that she's complaining.
The 32-year-old actress from Pittsfield, who graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at San Francisco's American Conservatory of Theater, invests each supporting role with enough sexy-smart depth to work steadily in a famously fickle industry, and she's quick to express her appreciation for quality roles of any size.
Still, when Banks hears her career compared to Charlize Theron's before she made ``Monster," or Halle Berry's before ``Monster's Ball," the lithe, blue-eyed thespian with the swept-back blond hair admits, ``I'd love to do one of those parts. If you've got one, let me know because they're not knocking on my door yet." Munching on a cookie in a Los Angeles hotel suite, Banks, relaxing in her bare feet and a black frock, muses, ``Every actor hankers for a challenging role that pushes the boundaries and expands their horizons."
In the meantime, Banks continues to turn in impressive work in films like ``Invincible," which opens Friday. Inspired by the life of late-blooming football star Vince Papale , ``Invincible" casts Greg Kinnear as Eagles coach Dick Vermeil with Banks as the wise-cracking, sports trivia-spouting bartender from Brooklyn who meets Wahlberg's down-on-his-luck Papale at the South Philly tavern where they both work. Banks's character is loosely modeled on Papale's wife , Janet.
``The first time I met the real Janet," Banks recalls, ``I showed up on the set in my long blond hair and she's appraising me, going, ` All right, I think this is going to work, although, you don't really do it in the boobs department' -- that's the first thing she said to me! And I thought, all right, I like this lady. She's so spicy. What I tried to do in the movie is give Janet that sense of sass because she really is this feisty little spark plug who keeps Vince on his toes."
Banks beat out several dozen actresses who auditioned for the role, according to ``Invincible" director Ericson Core. ``Elizabeth separated herself from her peers because she's not just a pretty face. What you find in her is acting skill, academic smarts, humor -- and she's thoughtful. For many actors, it's just about them, so a lot of their best work winds up on the editing room floor because what they're doing doesn't propel the story. Elizabeth is smart enough to know how to support the story, and strong enough not just to be enveloped in someone else's world. As a result, we were desperately putting as much of her in the movie as we could."
Core needed to make sure Banks clicked with Wahlberg, so she flew to New York for a getting-to-know - you chat. Recalls Banks, ``I tried to make some small talk and asked Mark, `So, where are you from in Boston? He tells me, and I say, `Oh, my mom's from Winthrop.' He goes, `Oh really? I went to jail in Winthrop!' And I thought, `I love this guy.' He has this well-documented history, but he knows how to be open about it, and I found that endearing."
Once she'd landed the role, Banks went to work on the accent. ``I have this ability to look like I'm some all-American chick from Minnesota or something, which is not Janet," Banks says. ``She's an urban working-class gal. To be believable as someone who belonged in that bar with those people, it helped to have that Brooklyn accent. I transcribed the whole thing myself using the International Phonetic Alphabet, where you transcribe each word and learn them that way."
As a self-described ``geek," Banks thrived at American Conservatory Theater. ``I'm very academic and always have been, so drama school was perfect for me," she says. ``I'm from that old-school acting tradition. Actors should study the classics and know Shakespeare and Chekhov and Oscar Wilde. I believe in craft. If I had gone straight to New York as a 22-year-old, I don't know that I would have known what to do."
As it turned out, Banks's training and camera-ready good looks stood her in good stead. Moving to New York upon graduation from ACT, she quickly landed work in TV commercials followed by guest spots on ``Law & Order." In 2001, Banks played a spunky camp counselor in ``Wet Hot American Summer," then won over Steven Spielberg for ``Catch Me If You Can," before getting cast in ``Seabiscuit."
That 1930s period piece, which earned $120 million and seven Oscar nominations, gave Banks a classy addition to her resume, but surprisingly failed to prompt interesting job offers, she says.
``It's funny because the after-effect of that movie was that I didn't really work that much. I got typecast as being very serious and suddenly nobody considered me for the fun comedy stuff I love to do. It was really `The 40-Year-Old Virgin' that hit the reset button, because this industry has a short memory and you're really only known for the last thing you did."
Banks's memorable ``Virgin" appearance, as the randy book-store clerk who tries to deflower the hero in a bubble bath, led to her sly parody of the Hitchcockian blonde in the B-movie lampoon ``Slither." Last summer, Banks performed in ``Bus Stop" at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and shot ``Invincible" in Philadelphia.
For the football movie, Banks didn't need much preparation to understand her sports-loving Janet character. She's married to football fanatic Max Handelman, co author of ``Why Fantasy Football Matters (And Our Lives Do Not)."
``I have no desire to be a Sunday widow, so therefore I participate in the football season fully," Banks says. ``My husband TiVos everything, and we're very into preseason games right now, scouting all the rookies and looking at the third- and fourth-round fantasy picks. That's what I've been consumed by lately."
Beyond ``Invincible," and the impending football season, Banks looks forward to the CBS miniseries ``Comanche Moon," a prequel to ``Lonesome Dove" starring Val Kilmer. ``I play Maggie Thorn, which is a totally different side of me," Banks says. ``She's a prostitute with a heart of gold who dies of tuberculosis and is a single mother back in the Old West, so there's lot to work with."
Circling back to the Serious Actress question, Banks sounds optimistic: ``Those kinds of things are out there. I think I have a long career and plenty of time to do them."
Hugh Hart can be reached at hughhart6@hotmail.com. 
