Elizabeth Banks Calls Out Hollywood's Double Industry While Reflecting on 'Charlie's Angels'

Elizabeth Banks is looking back at her 2019 movie, Charlie’s Angels, which starred Naomi Scott, Ella Balinska, and Kristen Stewart in the rebooted movies.

The 48-year-old actress, who helmed the film, called out the industry’s double standard in a new feature with The New York Times.

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While looking back on the film, which wasn’t a box office hit as once expected, Elizabeth said that it could’ve been billed an action movie versus a “feminist manifesto”.

“I would’ve liked to have made Mission: Impossible, but women aren’t directing Mission: Impossible,” she said. “I was able to direct an action movie, frankly, because it starred women and I’m a female director, and that is the confine right now in Hollywood.”

Elizabeth added that one “big producer of big action movies” once told her directly that she “couldn’t direct action, that male actors were not going to follow me.”

“He was flummoxed at the idea that a woman would be able to lead the Rock on a CGI screen, I guess?” she went on.

She did say that she is “proud of the movie. I loved Kristen Stewart being funny and light. I loved introducing Ella Balinska to the world. I loved working with Patrick Stewart. It was an incredible experience. It was very stressful, partly because when women do things in Hollywood it becomes this story. There was a story around Charlie’s Angels that I was creating some feminist manifesto. I was just making an action movie.”

“I wish that the movie had not been presented as just for girls, because I didn’t make it just for girls. There was a disconnect on the marketing side of it for me.”

Elizabeth still recognizes that she’s one of the “very few female directors in Hollywood” in a “male-dominated world.”

“That’s what I’m up against, but I can’t solve it and I don’t really want to analyze it. It’s not interesting to me,” she shared. “It puts me, frankly, in a position where the studio head is going to read it in The New York Times and be like, ‘Wow, that Liz Banks has got a lot to say.’ I don’t need that added pressure. I truly feel that it’s dangerous to talk about these things now.”

Here’s what Elizabeth has coming out next…