Emmy Award-nominated actress Elizabeth Banks may be best known for her roles in The Hunger Games and Pitch Perfect franchises, but she has developed a varied career both in front and behind the camera in a variety of genres. However, in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Banks confesses that she didn’t initially have a desire to become an actress and also speaks about how her role in The 40-Year-Old Virgin became a significant breakthrough in her career.
Banks reveals that she initially started to act simply because she needed to find a new after-school activity. She explains, “I got into acting by accident. I literally fell into performing. I was a student athlete, and I broke my leg sliding into third base playing softball when I was 13. I needed to find something new to do after school while my parents were at work. I joined the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar playing Pontius Pilate, so I could wear a robe over my cast. I really found that it was like playing sports, in that you had a team of people, and you were all going to put on the show together, everybody was relying on each other to play their part well, and at the end, everybody claps. I thought: ‘Wow, acting might be for me.’”
Elizabeth Banks’ Breakthrough Role in The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Though Banks is primarily known for her roles in comedy films, she needed a breakthrough role in the genre to get casting agents to consider her for comedic roles. She shares. “The unexpected curveball of my career was The 40-Year-Old Virgin. After Seabiscuit, I mostly was being considered for dramatic roles. I went to drama school, and I studied Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen, so I really knew the classics. It looked as if I was a very classic actress at that time, but I knew I was funny, and I always thought I would be in romantic comedies. I was the last person to audition for the role of Beth in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I did improv in the audition with Steve Carell, and ended up taking a lot of that improv to the set. That role really reset people’s ideas about what I could do as an actress.”
