Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks on ‘Better Sister’ Prep, Playing ‘Two Women Who Society Would Deem Villainous’

In Prime Video’s “The Better Sister,” Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks play estranged sisters Chloe and Nicky, who share everything from secrets to their first husband. What begins as a mystery of who killed said husband (Adam, portrayed by an excellent Corey Stoll) turns into an examination of sisterhood, motherhood and overall, how far you’d go for your family.

But it also allows Biel and Banks, who are executive producers on the Prime Video series as well, to dive into two very different characters.

“I love characters that are lying. It’s great to carry secrets through something. But I felt this is cool — to explore two women who society would deem villainous,” says Banks. “A bad mom who loses her kid is a villain in our society, and an overly ambitious woman who wants to lead, is successful, has a target on her back to be taken down. So as much as we are very, very different, I felt those similarities in that the world wants to take everything away from us. Society at large is like our common enemy, and we’re going to have to get through this together.”

Her character, Nicky, is viewed (and framed as) a bad mother who enjoys poking at the life of her sister, which, to the outside world, looks absolutely perfect.

“I got to be a fish out of water and react to this rarefied, rich world that she enters in the Hamptons and the New York penthouse apartment with the view, and it’s so pristine, and she’s so put together, and Nicky just does not care about that,” she says. “I’m messing with Chloe’s ideal life that she’s created her for herself, when I know where she’s from, what the history is, what she’s done to me. I have moral superiority the entire time. I loved that I got to F with her.”

So, how do you get into that space? Well, it was pretty simple: Dive into “My Name Is Barbra.”

“I was listening to the one, the only, Barbra Streisand’s 48-hour incredible autobiography that she reads. I was nerding out on every detail,” says Banks. “There’s a Spotify playlist in the order she tells her story chronologically… You can listen to a chapter about the album with Barry Gibb and then go listen to the whole album. There’s another blog that’s just a list of all the food she talks about in the book. She’s so inspiring.”

To tap into Chloe, Biel physically looked at the Anna Wintour archetype — “a perfectly put together, mogul-type person is someone she’d aspire to be,” says Biel. But inside, she could relate to a lot of Chloe.

“The more internal stuff I can understand. You sort of have to present, in some way, outward-facing to the world,” she says. “There’s a different world at home, and all of those things are true at the same time. I kind of connected with her on that level.”

Banks, much like a big sister, jumps in when Biel isn’t sure if she has similarities to Chloe: “You’re very type A. You run your own company — I’m reminding her — you dress impeccably. You have an apartment in New York. You rented a house in the Hamptons while we were making the show. And you love your kids!”

Biel can’t stop laughing, admitting of Chloe, “It’s making me uncomfortable how close I am now to this person.”

Banks reminds her of advice she was given: “Lean into what you’re good at.”

Biel agrees.

“That is a real skill — to do it well and to be a vault of secrets. And I’m not saying that in a dramatic way, that I am a vault of secrets, but on some level… I am a vault of secrets, and I have lived and existed in a world, ever since I was a kid, you keep it tight. She and I are definitely aligned in that way. I wonder what I would do to protect my own.”

So, there wasn’t too much of a process for Biel… except using one app on her phone. “I was just working on the damn Wordle, because she did it in five minutes, and it took me 12 hours.”

Much like Nicky, Banks can’t help but poke fun: “She had never done a Wordle! I was like, you’ve got to start doing a Wordle every day.”

If there was music in her earbuds during hair and makeup, Biel had on Salt Radio. “Music is so evocative, obviously. Sometimes I feel like that’s really a tool for some characters. Sometimes it’s not. I don’t think Chloe is a music person. I’m a music person,” Biel says. “I feel like Chloe listens to like classical music, because that is what is done in New York City with the high, fancy academic people, and she doesn’t even know anything about it, but she’s pretending.”