For most of summer 2024, Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks were photographed around New York City as they filmed their new Prime Video series, The Better Sister. Given the actors’ high profiles—as well as major interest in Biel’s then-new bob— the series based on the novel by best-selling author Alafair Burke has been on our radar for nearly a year.
Now Glamour can exclusively reveal that the thrilling eight-episode limited series — which also stars Corey Stoll, Lorraine Toussaint, Matthew Modine, Gloria Reuben, and more — will premiere on Thursday 29 May.
“I’m excited for people to see it unfold, who don’t know how the book ends, and all the twists and turns that are about to happen,” Elizabeth Banks tells Glamour. “I love a whodunit. And what’s fun about the series is that we’re all chess pieces getting moved around. Each episode sort of explores the level of control each person has at any given time.”
If you’re not familiar with the book, then let’s break it down for you here: It centres on two estranged sisters – Chloe (Jessica Biel) and Nicky (Elizabeth Banks) — who are thrown back together when a tragedy upends both of their lives. That tragedy is the death of Chloe’s handsome lawyer husband, Adam (Corey Stoll). Prior to the shocking event, Chloe, a high-profile media executive, was living a seemingly picturesque life with Adam and their teenage son, Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan). Meanwhile, Chloe’s estranged sister, Nicky, has been struggling to make ends meet and stay clean. The two have led very separate lives, but in the wake of Adam’s brutal murder, they must untangle a complicated family history to figure out what happened and who’s responsible.
Alafair Burke, who wrote the book, The Better Sister, tells Glamour that “with an adaptation, an author lets go of the work to change in new hands and in a separate form. At every stage, I have marvelled at the creativity and talent brought to this project. [Executive producers and showrunners] Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado have used a television series’ room to breathe to build out both plot and character, without losing the heart of the book — two sisters whose lives have taken them into separate worlds, suddenly forced to come together for the boy they love. I could not have hoped for better actors than Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks, who have captured the complexities of that sibling relationship so perfectly. I cannot wait for everyone to have a chance to watch these episodes.”
The sibling dynamic was a major reason that Banks and Biel wanted to come on board. “My character is a really complicated person in the sense that she’s really trying to hide this old life and this family unit and this sister of hers,” Biel says. “There is that thing of, ‘I don't actually belong here, and if anybody finds me out, my whole world’s going to crumble, it’s going to shatter into a million pieces.’ I don’t even have a sister in real life, [but] I have all these chosen sisters. So in playing this role, there was a lot of emotional stuff that we were going to have to be going through. I was always trying to explore how I could go even deeper and make it even more raw. There’s an opportunity to be really ugly honest. At every corner there was something new to be challenged by.”
Executive producer and co-showrunner Regina Corrado says it would have been easier for Biel’s character, Chloe, to cut Banks’s Nicky out of her life, but “it is much more difficult to try to forgive, to try to live with each other, to try to understand, and to try to move forward. I mean, the things that they’ve done to each other are biblically horrible.”
Who is the better sister then? “It changes minute to minute, hour to hour, in the sense that we’re all good and bad,” executive producer and co-showrunner Olivia Milch says. “It’s all very fluid and ongoing. The question is answered and unanswered and answerable and unanswerable. It changes moment to moment.”
Still, there’s plenty we do know, including the lengths Biel and Banks went to for their respective roles (trust us, it’s impressive), first-look photos, and more. Read on.
The Better Sister release date
The Better Sister will premiere all eight episodes on Prime Video on Thursday 29 May. All episodes will be available to stream on that date.
The Better Sister cast
Chloe Taylor (Jessica Biel): A high-profile media executive, Chloe lives an enviable (and expensive) life with her handsome lawyer husband, Adam, and teenage son, Ethan, by her side.
Nicky (Elizabeth Banks): Chloe’s estranged sister struggles to stay clean and make ends meet. Nicky is tested when tragedy forces a sudden and uneasy reunion with Chloe.
Adam Macintosh (Corey Stoll): Chloe's husband muscled his way from a local boy in Ohio to the white-shoe law firms of New York City, but finds it difficult to embrace the high-class life his wife has built around them. A devoted father, he worries about the impact their new wealth has on his son Ethan.
Catherine Lancaster (Lorraine Toussaint): Grand dame of publishing, New York City queen-maker, Chloe’s mentor and boss, Catherine is always thinking about the long game.
Bill Braddock (Matthew Modine): The powerful founding partner at Adam’s law firm, Bill Braddock is a man of appetites who can be an ally or a threat depending on the day.
Nancy Guidry (Kim Dickens): A detective investigating Adam’s murder, Guidry sees more than anyone else in the room and isn’t afraid to tell you all about it.
Matt Bowen (Bobby Naderi): Nancy Guidry’s younger partner, Bowen approaches things with a kinder style. But that softer approach doesn’t entirely mask his profound ambition.
Michelle Sanders (Gloria Reuben): A respected lawyer who has made a career of standing up when she’s told to sit down, Michelle Sanders faces a new kind of challenge when she crosses paths with the sisters.
Ethan Macintosh (Maxwell Acee Donovan): Ethan, 17, adores his loving mother, Chloe, and has a complicated relationship with his overachieving, overbearing father, Adam. When he’s swept up in a family tragedy, his mother can no longer protect him, and he’s forced to face his fears head on.
Jake Rodriguez (Gabriel Sloyer): Jake is a colleague of Adam’s at a high-level law firm in Manhattan. He and Adam are bonded by their outsider status at the firm, and over time he’s grown close with the whole family.
Have Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks ever worked together?
“We had met sort of socially over the years at the events that people go to, but we had never worked together, and it was really exciting,” Banks says. “Interestingly, I’ve been told that we look like sisters in the past, and we were actually on the same Vanity Fair cover for their Hollywood issue in 2008. I remember thinking, What a compliment to look like Jessica Biel; she’s an incredible-looking human being.”
In fact, Biel says that her resemblance to Banks is “definitely something I’ve heard over the years. It was one of my close friend’s husband, actually, who would always say, ‘You guys look so much alike.’”
Biel says she didn’t realise the similarities for herself until she saw her headshot next to Banks’s in the production office of The Better Sister. “I was looking at the wall like, Holy shit, we look a lot alike. It was weird, I didn’t even really realise it myself.”
Biel still remembers that Vanity Fair cover shoot with Banks, and in the years since, they’ve continued to run into each other now and then. “I [kept hearing] what a cool person she was and how awesome and funny and amazing she is. And then I really got to know all of those things to be very, very true while working with her over the summer.”
Did Jessica Biel cut her hair to play Chloe?
Yes! Remember that Instagram video Biel posted last May when she tugged on her hair to reveal a blunt bob? Biel reveals to Glamour that it was indeed for the show, even though the original plan was to maybe have her wear a super-short wig. Eventually, though, Biel decided to go through with it because “it’s just who Chloe is. Her hair is sort of a manifestation of the need for organisation, the need to keep the control of her life, so that sort of public-facing image just seemed like the right way to go.”
In fact, Biel says she’d been thinking about making the change for a long time, so The Better Sister just happened to be the perfect moment. “I thought, Okay, well, f**k it, let’s go. Let's just cut it.” The verdict? “It was fun,” Biel says, looking back. “I think I felt, why didn’t I do this sooner? You don’t feel your hair on your shoulders anymore…like you’re floating almost. It didn’t scare me at all. I felt like, Oh, that’s who I am. I don’t know [why] I’ve been hiding under this long hair for so long…but I think you have to be ready for a big change like that. And I was. I felt freed by it, and I felt like it was truly doing the right thing for who Chloe really is.”
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Banks was equally as impressed, thinking, Oh man, she’s really going for it; I love this sort of austere bob for her. “Honestly, I just wanted to be the exact opposite of that. So it was like, ‘Okay, now that I know that’s what she’s doing, that gave me the sense that [my character’s hair] needed to be long and messy and big…as messy as I am as a character.”
Meanwhile, Biel says she modelled Chloe’s look and demeanour after several high-profile figures, including Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, the late Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and also the late Princess Diana. “I think Chloe would have worked very hard to make her life and appearance look effortless, like those women that came from that old money and that old, sophisticated family legacy, but underneath the surface, that’s just not her natural state of being,” she says.
How did Elizabeth Banks prep for the role?
“I got work sober for three months,” Banks tells Glamour of her decision to give up drinking for a time. “I cold-turkey’d. That was the connection point that I wanted to have with my character, Nicky. This was never going to be a forever decision for me, but it was something that I thought for this character — who is trying to stay clean — that I wanted to try. This was a character that I could really have fun with and also show a lot of sides of me. She’s serious at turns, and what’s happening has really high stakes, but she’s also messy and kind of funny.”
In fact, Biel initially read for the role of Nicky. “I met with Craig, our director, initially talking about Nicky. A couple days later I got a call from the studio saying, ‘We’d love you to do Chloe.’ I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ It was this total switcheroo, and then I had to relook at it for the Chloe character.” Biel says it was then that she really started to think she might be better suited for this other character. “And then when I heard that they were talking to Elizabeth, it started to make a lot of sense to me. Elizabeth has that natural kind of wild, je ne sais quoi, kind of ‘don’t give a crap,’ ‘will say whatever,’ ‘is funny.’ She has that kind of edge to her that was so natural to Nicky. Me playing Nicky would’ve been a very different kind of thing.”
As for what that character would have been, Biel concedes that she doesn’t know, but “it would not have been what Elizabeth brought to the table, and I think she was so much probably better cast in that role than me. [But in the end], I saw the benefits to both [characters], and just thought, ‘Well, great, I’d be happy to do this other one.’”
Where does The Better Sister take place?
The main action takes place in New York — Manhattan and the Hamptons on Long Island. According to executive producer Olivia Milch, the show filmed a bit in the Hamptons, but other Long Island locales, including Port Jefferson and Oyster Bay, were also used. The show’s sound stages were in Queens.
The Better Sister trailer
A trailer has not dropped yet, but we’ll update this piece as soon as it drops.
Who’s producing the series?
Olivia Milch (Ocean’s 8) and Regina Corrado (Mayor of Kingstown) are executive producers and showrunners. Series director Craig Gillespie (Pam & Tommy) and Annie Marter are executive producers through Fortunate Jack Productions alongside executive producers Marty Adelstein, Becky Clements and Alissa Bachner through Tomorrow Studios (One Piece), Elizabeth Banks and Jessica Biel, Michelle Purple and Kerry Orent. The series is produced by Tomorrow Studios (part of ITV Studios) and Amazon MGM Studios.
Above all, Milch says, the casting of Banks and Biel allowed the show to really take off. “They brought so much vitality and such dynamism to the characters individually, and then the relationship between the sisters. You can’t imagine it any other way now. We were off to the races, and we felt so lucky that we were able to get to make it, especially at this moment in our industry.”
We’ll update this post as more information becomes available.
A version of this article was originally published on GLAMOUR US.
