When it comes to gender parity in Hollywood, Elizabeth Banks is wide awake.
“To borrow a phrase that I know very little about, I think it’s important for women to be real ‘woke’ right now,” Banks said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I do feel like young women, in particular, have woken up to the fact that things they took for granted can no longer be taken for granted. You’ve got to keep fighting for progress.”
Banks and her husband, Max Handelman, co-founded the production company, Brownstone Productions, which created the popular “Pitch Perfect” franchise among other films. The company is now branching into television projects.
“We look for female directors and female writers,” Banks said. “We work with a lot of female voices. And we work with guys, too. We’re not anti-man. We always keep that list very open and fluid. For me to feel like I’m actually making a difference in our business requires action and not just talking about it. “
Banks is directing and producing an upcoming reboot of “Charlie’s Angels.”
“With a movie like ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ getting to do action and visual effects, and I loved on ‘Pitch Perfect’ the huge challenge of making a movie musical. I mean, that’s no small feat. It’s a big job, and I like the constant challenge.”
Banks has appeared in more than 50 films, but it’s her off-screen work that excites her most these days.
“I am the byproduct of all of the anecdotal and now accurate information that we have about the number of roles available to women of a certain age,” she said. “The problem is that life was getting a little mundane and boring, and I wasn’t feeling challenged by those jobs for a while. If you want to fight being bored in this business as a woman, especially as a woman who has been around for a minute, you have to figure it out on your own.”