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They’re not related, but from the first time they sat down to discuss their roles in Prime Video’s domestic thriller, The Better Sister, Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks clicked in a way that carried through to their performances, both actresses said on Sunday at Deadline Contenders TV.
“I felt, like, an immediate connection the first time we had lunch together,” Biel said at a panel with Banks and co-showrunners and executive producers, Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado. Banks agreed, saying, “I felt like the big sister right away.”
The two actresses, who are also executive producers on the show, discussed Biel’s anxieties about sending her son off to camp for the first time — an experience that Banks was able to speak to knowledgeably as a mother whose children are older. “I was the younger sister, she was the older sister, and that’s just the dynamic,” Biel said.
Based on the bestseller by crime novelist and former prosecutor Alafair Burke, the series follows a successful New York City career woman, Chloe (Biel), and her older but struggling alcoholic sibling, Nicky (Banks), as their already strained relationship is rocked by the murder of Chloe’s lawyer husband, Adam (Corey Stoll). Suspicion falls on Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan), the teen-aged son that Adam had with Nicky — yes, Nicky — before they divorced and Adam, having won outright custody of Ethan, married “up,” wedding Nicky’s more accomplished sister Chloe.
RELATED: Contenders TV — Deadline’s Complete Coverage
Chloe — suddenly, violently widowed — is left alone to care for the nephew whom she was helping to raise as a son, and who is now under investigation for having possibly killed his own father. As Chloe’s dream life unravels, she finds herself thrown back into close quarters with estranged sister Nicky. Together, they try to work through old conflicts and resentments to uncover the truth behind the death of a man they both knew — or thought they knew — intimately.
The Contenders TV audience in Los Angeles got an early, exclusive look at a clip from the show, before all eight episodes drop May 29 on Prime Video.
Milch raved about Burke’s “twisty, turny, amazing” novel and said that when Tomorrow Studios acquired the rights, she and Corrado found themselves with an opportunity to do what they love: “telling stories about excellent, complicated women.”
The added dimension of a family history complicated by alcoholism was another attraction for the pair.
“I think the thing that really stuck with us when I was reading was this idea that siblings get different versions of their parents depending on birth order, and that shapes your identity,” Milch said. “It shapes how you conceive of yourself, how you conceive of your sibling, and particularly if there is a moment of sobriety for a parent. You know, I was 10 when my dad got sober. My sister was 15, my brother was 13. We had very different experiences and memories of our childhood, and that’s at play for these characters as well, for Nicky and Chloe.”
“Also, what’s more savage than family?” Corrado added.
Biel also praised the female-led team behind The Better Sister, calling herself “lucky” to work with “all these major females at the heads of all these incredible departments.”
Milch recalled “a real sense of love and camaraderie and community” on set, “and maybe a little less ego than maybe you sometimes feel when there’s other dynamics at play.”
Check back on Monday for the panel video.
