Jessica Biel On Why She Channeled Anna Wintour

In The Better Sister, Jessica Biel stars as Chloe, a successful magazine editor whose polished surface belies the tangled mess of her past. In the wake of her sister Nicky (Elizabeth Banks)’s descent into addiction, Chloe has somehow taken over Nicky’s life, marrying her ex-husband Adam (Corey Stoll) and even raising her son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan). But when a sudden death upends everything, Nicky reappears, and the past begins to rear its head. Here, speaking via Zoom from Europe where she has joined husband Justin Timberlake on tour with their kids, Biel muses on if she would feasibly return for a second season and what’s next, including the possibility of directing. 

DEADLINE: Chloe has to maintain appearances for her public persona. How much did you relate to her sense of being constantly observed and scrutinized?

JESSICA BIEL: That’s definitely one of the parallels that she and I share. I do know what that’s like. And there is a separation on some level of who you are at work and who you are at home, at least in my business. But I think that’s true for many businesses. I do relate to that side of her job and her life, and she has a lot more hard, extreme secrets that she’s keeping. But it doesn’t matter, I still understand that presenting in a certain way. But I also feel like everybody understands that now, with our social media lives and what we want to curate to show the world. We all do that on some level.

DEADLINE: Chloe’s clothes are such a way in to immediately understanding how she presents that front. She had an all-white dress, and a form-fitting very chic dress on in the first episode. How much did that help you and did you have input on her looks?

BIEL: Oh, yeah. Working with Stacey Battat, our amazing costume designer, was a dream. We really collaborated well together, and she had a real idea of what she felt could be right for Chloe and I just agreed with her pretty much on almost everything… I feel like I’ve heard Elizabeth say this, that she really wanted to be specific about where Nicky shopped. What would she actually have bought and been able to purchase? And not caring that she looks sloppy or rough around the edges, or whatever it is you want to say about how Nicky appears, was super important.

 And on the other extreme of that was Chloe. She would spend a last dollar to have the right label, to have the right trending beautiful power suit to give off a persona of strength and power but also understanding and I’m here to fight for you, I can be your voice, I’ll stand up for you, but don’t mess with me. All these different things were going on for her, and it always helps so much, specifically I think a character like her, where those choices are really deliberate. She’s making really deliberate choices about her image and how she wants you to perceive her, how she wants to be observed, how she wants to curated. It wasn’t necessarily the easiest costumes to wear all the time and I think that was important, because comfort is just not part of what is important to her, so she will suffer. She will suffer for that fashion. She will suffer for that image. And she does that over and over emotionally, energetically. She does it all the time.

DEADLINE: Chloe has this core personality trait where she can just be pure steel. Some of that comes from trauma, some of it is an inherent trait maybe. Where do you feel like her steel comes from?

BIEL: She has a real self-worth issue, but you would never know that. And that’s by design, but I don’t believe that she feels worthy of the life that she has. I don’t believe that she feels worthy of the son that she has and this ‘great’ husband and this perfect life, even though she worked so hard to curate it and make you think that she’s this confident person who can teach you how to be the same, or who can bring you down her golden pathway to confidence and power. And that’s what’s so interesting about her and such a dichotomy about her, because she’s 100% the opposite of what she is showing you.

I started thinking about just those legacy New York families and those women who are effortless in that world, in those power media spaces, or fashion.

I think she’s riddled with shame and guilt about the decisions that she’s made surrounding her sister and her sister’s life and Ethan and helping Adam take him away from her, and now she’s with Adam. All of these moves, she never wanted to have happen, and yet it happened, and she was, in her mind, almost too weak to stop it. And what kind of a person does that? She’s a self-loathing human, which is why she really is intrigued by reading all the comments about her [online] and the violence against her and people saying those horrible things about her. There’s a part of her that needs to feel that pain, that’s that suffering part of like, “I deserve that. They’re right about me. They see me.” I don’t know if you can say she likes it, but it’s almost like that self-flagellation thing, that shame. That is her underneath this shining ‘stand up for women, stand up for what’s right’ kind of persona, I think. That’s what I was working with… But also, all the things that she’s done, that life cannot be for nothing because of all the wake of the decisions in the past. If it doesn’t work out, how do you live with yourself? If this doesn’t work, I am nothing. I am nobody. I am the grossest. I think she thinks she’s a disgusting human being.

DEADLINE: You’ve talked about drawing on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and maybe even Anna Wintour, just for the way that you comport yourself as Chloe.

BIEL: Yes. I started thinking about just those legacy New York families and those women who are effortless in that world, in those power media spaces, or fashion. Even somebody who is just born and bred in that world and knows how to carry themselves and is super smart, goes to the right school, has the great interesting job, has amazing, interesting academic friends and artist friends. In her mind that is who she needs to be. And somebody like Anna Wintour would be that person who is just New York royalty and the Kennedys are New York royalty, but they don’t have to try. That’s just who they are. They’re part of those families. They’re part of the fabric of that place. She is not part of that, so it’s a lot of effort. Those women do it effortlessly and she has learned over the years how to do it pretty seamlessly, but you scratch under the surface just a little bit. And that Ohio — nothing against Ohio — but that particular family in that particular Midwestern kind of feel, it’s right there under the surface that she’s just trying to push it away.

DEADLINE: At this point in your career, what kind of producing opportunities are you looking for specifically? What do you and your Iron Ocean producing partner Michelle Purple talk about in terms of where you want to go next?

BIEL: We always talk about complex female characters. That will always be a focus, whether I’m playing or somebody else, it doesn’t matter, that’s always something you’re looking for, and that I’m interested in. But I think [about] opening up the genres a little bit for the company and for myself. I can’t do murder mysteries forever only.

DEADLINE: I do love them though.

BIEL: I love them. I do too, and I will always watch, but it’s a certain kind of performance. It’s a certain kind of itch that I needed to scratch, I guess. And I feel like it would be a disservice to myself to just continue to stay in that same lane. So, I’m just curious about other genres, I think, more than anything at this moment, but without ever taking the focus off the psychological thrillers or suspenseful, complicated female stories. I just love them and I just love human beings. I’m constantly fascinated by these positions that we get into. I feel like so many times in my life I’ve been like, “I never thought I would be in this position.” And then times that by 100, and that’s what these characters are going through. So, I can’t help but be fascinated by humans and the decisions that they make.

I say I want to do other things, we’ll see. I just want to be inspired. I want to be excited. I want to read something that I feel like isn’t derivative of anything that I’ve read before, that just feels like, “Whoa, I don’t even know how to do that. Maybe I should try it. Oh, that’s scary.” That’s the feeling I want to feel. I want to feel like I don’t know if I’m capable of this.

There is a separation on some level of who you are at work and who you are at home, at least in my business. But I think that’s true for many businesses. I do relate to that side of her job and her life

DEADLINE: You’ve directed a short. Would you direct a feature or television? Is that of interest?

BIEL: I’ve thought about it. Directing an episode or a couple episodes in a show that we’re producing that I really understand would be a really good, more safe learning environment. But I also really want to make sure that I’m not just hiring myself instead of hiring the right person for the job. It has to be the right thing. I really have to understand how to do it properly. I really want to make sure that I feel confident, so maybe. I think when my kids are a little bit older, it’s something that maybe I can engage with a little bit more. I feel like I’m just in that hot spot of time where I’m already gone from my family quite a lot and my little one’s still really young and I know parents are gone all the time, and female directors are leaving their families all the time. And I think it’s amazing. And I hope that continues to happen, and I hope we have more female directors that feel confident to do that. I just haven’t found the right thing. It hasn’t been the right moment. I haven’t had enough confidence in myself, I think, to say, “I really understand. I’d do this better than anybody else.” You know?

DEADLINE: I know The Better Sister is a limited series, but what would you say if a Season 2 was floated?

BIEL: Well, I would say that I loved the experience. I loved working with our entire cast and [showrunners] Olivia [Milch] and Regina [Corrado], they were amazing. They just made such a beautifully safe and warm set, as I know we’ve talked about before. But for me, it’s always like, “OK, where’s the level of believability? Where do we begin again? Do we have enough to say?” Because, same with The Sinner, for me, that was obviously always a limited series, and then it had different legs and went on this other journey that we didn’t expect, but we talked quite a lot about, “Well, could Cora Tannetti come back for Season 2? How would that work?” This is just one example of how it didn’t work for that one, but we just couldn’t find a way in that didn’t feel like we were like, “Well, we don’t want to watch her do this. What’s the fresh feel? What’s the new thing?” And it was obvious that she just couldn’t be in it, which was a bummer on some level. And also, we knew it was the right decision from a producerial standpoint.

So, I would put a producer hat on at this point and go, “OK, so what are the options here? How are we going to be believable? Of course, we love seeing these women together. Of course, it’s so fun. How does it work? And is it enough to be as good or better than the first season?” So, I would ask those technical questions, but it was a dream job.

DEADLINE: Is there a part of Chloe that stays with you?

BIEL: Yeah, probably. I feel like what has stuck with me is sitting in that courtroom in those sequences and envisioning your child up there and just the nightmare of that. It would be horrible enough to think about you as a grownup having to go up there and be accused of something like that, but your child being accused of something like that, I think that’s what I will wake up at night going, “Oh my god, I know how this plays out. I’ve got to make sure my kids are on the straight and narrow.” I think about that. That’s the thing that comes up for me is that mother/son horror of your kid has just been swept off into this thing that you have no control over. And that, for me, takes my breath away.