Elizabeth Banks knows that her story about Thor: Ragnarok will become clickbait
“OK, I brought up Thor. You’re going to clickbait me in that fucking article now," Elizabeth Banks tells Variety. “I never should have said it out loud.”
Elizabeth Banks isn’t one to shy from action: the very title of her next project, Cocaine Bear, cements that. But sometimes, as she plainly admits, it’s the action that shies from her. In a new conversation with Variety’s Adam B. Vary, Banks reveals that the last project she was really excited about the possibility of directing was Thor: Ragnarok—but “nothing ever happened.”
“No one called me [back],” she says. “Taika Waititi got the job. Rightfully so.”
Over its history, four women have directed films for Marvel Studios: Anna Boden (who helmed 2019's Captain Marvel alongside her directing partner Ryan Fleck), Cate Shortland (2021’s Black Widow), Chloé Zhao (2021’s Eternals) and Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, set to premiere this July).
Per Banks, she doesn’t “get approached that much about doing anything” these days, even though she stresses she’s “open for business.” But at the same time, Banks says she’s only interested these days in telling stories that allow her some personal freedoms she can really sink her teeth into.
“I can’t do someone else’s vision,” she says. “I really want to bring my sensibility to things.”
No stranger to the whims of online media, Banks knows the Thor: Ragnarok stuff is the perfect tidbit to fuel “fucking clickbait.” But after well over a decade doing the interview circuit, she says she’s not all that bothered about it anymore.
“This article will be disastrous for me on some level, no matter what,” she says. “Someone will find something to put in some headline to get clicked on, and I’ll get in trouble with somebody. It’s fine. It’s part of it. Always happens.”
Cocaine Bear lands in theaters on February 24 of this year.