Key Points
Elizabeth Banks plays a tiny(-sized) character on The Miniature Wife, which required a lot of solo green screen work.
She stars in the new Peacock drama alongside Succession alum Matthew Macfadyen.
The new series premieres Thursday, April 9.
Elizabeth Banks may play a 6-inch-tall character on The Miniature Wife, but the role impacted her in a big way.
“My husband likes to say that this was the least mentally prepared I’ve ever been for a job,” the actress tells Entertainment Weekly.
Banks stars on the upcoming Peacock series as Lindy, a Pulitzer prize-winning author, wife, and mom who finds herself accidentally shrunk by her husband, genius scientist Les (Matthew Macfadyen).
While Banks and Macfadyen say they had instant chemistry, much of Banks’ filming days were spent standing alone in front of a green screen having to mentally conjure the entire world around her — and its inherent dangers, from a cat to a person walking in to how overwhelming the sound is.
“I spent a lot of time alone in a mug having a conversation with a camera that is 150 feet away from me to give the right perspective,” she explains. “The level of imagination and vulnerability that that required, it was a lot to carry. I have not felt that vulnerable in a really long time. It was incredibly challenging.”
Lindy (Elizabeth Banks) on ‘The Miniature Wife’
Credit: Rafy/PEACOCK
That sense of isolation wasn’t just technical — it ultimately deepened Banks’ emotional connection to Lindy’s journey. As the series unfolds, Lindy finds herself cut off not only physically, but emotionally, from the life she once knew, navigating a fractured marriage that was already under strain long before the accident.
Still, Banks says the groundwork she and Macfadyen laid together helped bridge that distance, even when they weren’t sharing the same set. She explains that the pair rehearsed extensively and built a rhythm early on, allowing her to “always imagine him doing whatever he was doing in a scene,” even when she was acting opposite thin air.
Occasionally, that disconnect led to surprising tonal shifts. In one sequence involving the couple’s cat, Banks was struck by how much darker Macfadyen played the moment than she anticipated.
“I thought, ‘Oh man, he is throwing down the gauntlet. This has to be dead serious now. Okay, got it,'” she recalls.
That push-and-pull is central to the show, which balances absurd, high-concept comedy with sharp emotional stakes. As Lindy and Les battle each other in increasingly elaborate ways, the question of whether audiences should root for them becomes part of the fun — and the challenge.
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“I hoped that there was sort of an inner lightness that would still seep through, so you wouldn’t hate these people,” Banks says.
The Miniature Wife premieres Thursday, April 9, on Peacock.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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