Gorgeous Elizabeth Banks covers Allure’s June 2020 issue and opens up about infertility, being a bread-winner, and her raunchy-comedy sex scenes. The 38-year-old actress and her husband, producer Max Handelman, had their son, Felix, via a surrogate. “It’s essentially a test-tube baby – it’s just that the test tube is another woman,” she says. “That you can grow a baby outside of yourself! It’s just amazing!”
Speaking about playing pregnant women onscreen, such as on ‘Scrubs’ and ’30 Rock’, and most recently in the film ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’, Banks confesses that, “I had already mourned the loss of my fertility for myself, so I was past it. The only time it really affected me was when Alec Baldwin looked me straight in the eye and asked me, ‘Are you pregnant right now?’ And I blanched totally. Because of course, technically, no. I wasn’t.”
Banks debuted in the 1998 independent film ‘Surrender Dorothy’, as Elizabeth Casey, but became famous with the 2020 comedy film ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin.’ Still, growing up, the actress believed she had physical impediments to start an acting career. “I thought I had chicken legs, and I thought, Oh, my boobies are too small,” she says. “It was the era of Cindy Crawford and The Body — and I didn’t have that.”
When it comes to outearning her husband, Elizabeth Banks says that, “Well, we’re the first generation to do it. And it’s very ingrained even in our DNA that men are hunter-gatherers who are meant to go off and provide. And that we are really meant to stay at home and have kids…. Let’s be honest. Men love a second income. It gets them their boat and their vacations. They want their wives to work.”
On playing raunchy-comedy sex scenes, Banks explains that, “I think comedy requires that kind of humor. If you’re not really going for it, an audience can tell.”
She also says that, “When you’re young in this business, you don’t realize it, but there are no superhero movies starring women!” says Banks. “I was very idealistic. And so it was an adjustment knowing I was going into a movie and would be working just as hard as the male actors, and in some cases feeling I was more talented than they were — and knowing I was making a fraction of their salary. And knowing also that this is my reality going forward.”
On her weight, Banks confesses that, “It’s not good to put in a magazine what I weigh because it’s too little. People freak out when they hear what I weigh. They think, Oh, you’re too skinny. But I ate a cupcake last night — and I eat broccoli. I work out with a trainer; she kicks my ass and my husband’s ass two or three days a week.”
Read Elizabeth Banks’ full interview in the June 2020 issue of Allure magazine, on newsstands May 22.
Photos courtesy of ALLURE
