Elizabeth Banks on Her Roles in The Hunger Games, Our Idiot Brother, and 30 Rock

Elizabeth Banks landed her first feature role ten years ago, as Paul Rudd’s slobbery make-out partner in Wet Hot American Summer. Now the two are onto their fifth collaboration with Our Idiot Brother (in theaters August 26). In it, Banks plays a cutthroat journalist named Miranda who is trying to impress her bosses at Vanity Fair with a good story. Rudd is the movie’s idiot brother, Ned, a guy who’s just out of jail for selling pot to a cop in uniform and reentering the lives of his three putatively more “together” sisters (Banks, Emily Mortimer, and Zooey Deschanel). Jada Yuan spoke with Banks for a New York Magazine feature shortly after the actress finished shooting her first scenes for what is sure to be her most watched movie to date: The Hunger Games, the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s hugely popular dystopian trilogy. Banks stars as Effie Trinket, the pink-haired “mentor” to teenage heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) as she’s forced to fight other kids to the death on TV. Here is more from their wide-ranging conversation. Read More...