She told Entertainment Weekly:
Let’s talk Hunger Games: Where did you come up with Effie’s voice?
It’s a combination of The Philadelphia Story and Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame.
Really?
Rosalind Russell is just amazing. It’s one of my favorite performances ever. I wanted Effie to be really theatrical. I just wanted to make sure she didn’t sound too British. She needed to be a little highfalutin.
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| (Photo: Nicolas Guérin/Contour by Getty Images) |
Banks, 37, is petite and pretty, but she does, in fact, look a little freakish. Her brows have been bleached to invisibility so she can wear the mask of makeup required for what is sure to be the most watched and scrutinized role of her career—as Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games, the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s hugely popular dystopian trilogy. Trinket is the pink-haired “mentor” to teenage heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) as she’s forced to fight other kids to the death on TV. Banks, who got the role after hounding director Gary Ross, with whom she’d worked on Secretariat, had long been a fan of the books. “I definitely see parallels” to today’s world, she says. “The Hunger Games is a tried-and-true tale about a totalitarian society.”
It’s not America—yet—but she does worry. “We have a problem where the top 1 percent controls everything and then 99 percent of Americans don’t have a say in their daily life. That stuff really affects me because I grew up in a working-class family—I worked three jobs in college—and my parents and sisters all lost jobs recently.”
Her latest film, Our Idiot Brother, reminds her of her family, too. In it she plays a cutthroat journalist named Miranda who is trying to impress her bosses at Vanity Fair with a good story. The film was written by real-life Vanity Fair writer Evgenia Peretz and her husband, David Schisgall, and directed by her non-idiot brother, former Lemonheads bassist Jesse Peretz. The movie’s idiot brother is Ned, played by Paul Rudd, just out of jail for selling pot to a cop in uniform and reentering the lives of his three putatively more “together” sisters: ruthless Miranda; Emily Mortimer’s in-denial-about-her-unhappiness stay-at-home mom; and Zooey Deschanel’s restless Brooklyn lesbian, who’s having issues settling down with girlfriend Rashida Jones.
EW Inside Movies recently interviewed Elizabeth Banks about her experience while filming 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer and briefly asks her about her role in ‘The Hunger Games,’ though she wasn’t able to say much at all about it.
“You’re playing Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games. What can you tell us about that?
Um, it’s really great. I’m basically sworn to secrecy. I will say, her hair is pink, you don’t have to worry. We’re not messing with it too much.”
