ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Skincare star Elizabeth Banks about the upcoming thriller directed by Austin Peters. IFC Films will release the movie exclusively in theaters on August 16, 2024.
“Famed aesthetician Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks) is about to take her career to the next level by launching her very own skincare line, but her personal and work lives are challenged when rival facialist Angel Vergara (Luis Gerardo Méndez) opens a new skincare boutique directly across from her store. She starts to suspect that someone is trying to sabotage her reputation and business, and together with her friend Jordan (Lewis Pullman), she embarks on a mission to unravel the mystery of who is trying to destroy her life,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Congrats on Skincare. What I liked about the film is that it is really fun, but it’s also a very great character study of who you play, Hope Goldman. I read that you didn’t find out that it was based on true events until later on in production. I feel like that helps the movie because you can really just focus on the character and not feel beholden to anything. So I wanted to get your thoughts on that.
Elizabeth Banks: I read a great script with a beautiful letter from Austin about why I had to be Hope Goldman, and then I watched his documentary, which really moved me. It was about Diplo doing a concert. I just thought, “Wow, this guy knows how to pull emotion out of a really surprising scenario.” I loved Hope. I agree. She was super complex, really interesting, fighting for relevance as an aging woman in an industry that prizes beauty and youth and new above all else. I felt very connected to that as a middle-aged woman in Hollywood. Then I thought that the layers of sort of stress and pressure on her that build over the movie and the sense of desperation that she feels to sort of understand what the hell’s happening to her and who’s out to get her in that layer of paranoia.
I mean, those were all the things that drew me to it. So finding out that it was also “ripped from the headlines” was almost like a cherry on top, you know? It’s like back in the day doing Law and Order episodes and being like, where did they read this from? I think it’s fun when things have that connection. I liken it to like Cocaine Bear is real, but then also completely fictionalized, you know? So it was great.
Look, I love that. I think it’s a great connection for the audience to feel. Sometimes I feel like [in] Hollywood, every story’s been done. The ripped from the headlines helps us tell people we can’t make this stuff up. You know? It’s like if we told you that we wrote this, you might think that we made it up. It was fake. That’s too much. But actually, things like this are happening in the world around us all the time.
Hope is somebody who is very much about projecting control and showing so much externally, and she’s in this part of her life where she has no control. She is completely losing it. So it’s important more than ever to project that. So what was most interesting about playing that dichotomy there?
I love that you noticed that. Yeah, I felt the same way. I felt like it was a vicious cycle, right? Every time she would get back a little sense of control by over-controlling something, it would just like get worse and then she would have to work harder at it. I just felt, again, like that ramping up of all of that was one of the most fun things about playing this role and about the trajectory of the movie.
Because she also presents as someone who is both a victim and also a chaos machine. So I also love that the audience is like, “Are we rooting for her?” “Do we think she’s a bad person or do we want her to win?” I just love that. I like to put myself in the audience’s shoes when I read something, and I thought there was just such a great mystery here about what the hell is really going on, and she’s thinking the same thing.
I also think it’s really important to mention the online doxing of this woman and the sort of loss of dignity and control that gives to people. It can happen to literally anyone, it recently happened to Taylor Swift. It is so horrifying and shocking that men use this as a tool against women. I think it can’t be overstated how much of a shock to her system that is and how it gets the wheels of paranoia really turning for her.
So I love where that falls in the movie, right? When she thinks she’s got it a little more under control with the email getting hacked, but then it’s like, “Oh, no, no, there’s something even worse. There’s another level to that that’s even worse.” Who wouldn’t wanna punish the person that did that to you? You would wanna punish that person. You would wanna find them, and you would wanna hurt them.
Thanks to Elizabeth Banks for taking the time to talk about Skincare.
