From first lady to "Porno" star: actress Elizabeth Banks dishes the dirt

Elizabeth Banks is everywhere this season.

"It's not my fault!" the co-star of Oliver Stone's "W." says.

Friday, she'll have a title role in "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" and a starring role next month in "Role Models."

A veteran of everything from the "Spider-Man" movies to "Seabiscuit" to TV's "Scrubs" to "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," she has no actual reason to be ashamed of appearing in "Porno" in every multiplex in the country.

Even if most of that exposure is in a comedy about two cash-strapped roommates and lifelong friends who try to make some bucks in an X-rated movie.

The brainchild of "Clerks" and "Dogma" writer-director Kevin Smith, "Zack and Miri" also features Seth Rogen. When Rosario Dawson had to bow out of the Miri role, Rogen, who'd worked with Banks in "Virgin," was thrilled to see her at the top of a list of available actresses.

"We're friends; I think that helps, you can tell that we know each other," he says. "And she has a really dirty sensibility, which is one of the reasons why I thought she'd be good for the movie in the first place. I knew she wouldn't sue me."

But even a pal of raunchy Rogen must have had some trepidation about committing to a movie like this, whose cast includes real porn star Katie Morgan and the business's most notorious ex-actress, Traci Lords.

"Literally zero," Banks says, persuasively, when asked if there was any hesitation. "I have no issues or qualms about any of the sexually explicit material in the movie. People ask me, 'How'd you tell your mom?'

"I called my mom and said, 'I'm in "Zack and Miri Make a Porno." That's my next movie, I can't wait, prepare your friends.'

"But I really responded to the romance in the story. I was never going to do anything in this movie that I was not going to be proud of."

Getting naked

Indeed, it takes discovering that they'd rather make love than have sex for money that makes Zack and Miri the kind of couple audiences root for. Smith, whose foul-mouthed movies have sometimes been redeemed by realistic female characters (think "Chasing Amy"), says he can't imagine this one getting there without Banks.

"She's hands down the best actress I've ever worked with," the director declares. "She just gives you so much. She completely feminized that role. In the hands of another actress, it might have just sounded like two dudes talking to each other. But Elizabeth actually made Miri a believable woman."

Banks would have given even more, but it turned out she didn't have to.

"I was prepared to shoot our porn scene naked with the understanding that my bits and parts would be covered, mostly by Seth," she explains, cackling. "So I wasn't really worried about it. I don't know what happened, but two days before, Kevin had an epiphany or something. I think he was gonna be more uncomfortable with us being naked around him than we were gonna be uncomfortable."

There's one other person whose sensibility we have to wonder about; Max Handelman, Banks' husband of five years and boyfriend for 11 years before that. The couple, who met at the University of Pennsylvania, are partners in a production company, Brownstone.

"Max is a great businessman, and he thought this was a great opportunity, so he was all for me making this movie," Banks says.

"He's had a lot of practice preparing himself for me to be with other men," she says, laughing. "It started long ago when he had to watch me make out with other boys in college plays. We are long past our jealousy issues, thank God."

Portraying Laura Bush

Then known as Elizabeth Mitchell, Banks graduated magna cum laude from Penn, then attended San Francisco's prestigious American Conservatory Theater. That quickly led to TV work and her first, very prestigious film gig: "Wet Hot American Summer."

It wasn't out of embarrassment that she changed her stage name for that smutty-minded comedy; the Screen Actors Guild had another Elizabeth Mitchell ("Lost") registered.

Like she does with many things, Banks combined creativity with practicality when picking her new moniker.

"It had nothing to do with liking Tyra or Ernie or any other Banks. I just wanted something short and sweet and a little WASP-y, because I wanted to advertise exactly what I was."

Which partially explains why Banks is so convincing as our current first lady. It took some craft; the actress says she has a lot more in common with characters like Miri ... minus the you-know-what.

"I grew up very similarly to Miri, in a duplex in a working-class town in Massachusetts.

"And I got to have a lot of say over what she was like. With Laura Bush, those things are already predetermined. You need to nail the reality of it, first and foremost. So it was much more starting from the external, working from the outside in.

"I dug through all the biographical material and I just tried to hold onto little things that I felt that I could play," adds Banks, who met the first couple at a White House screening of "Seabiscuit" long before she'd ever dreamed she'd portray Bush.

"One of those is that she says, over and over again, that her job as first lady is to mind the psychological and emotional health of the president of the United States. That's something, as a supportive wife myself, that I understood and I felt I could really play."

Banks also lends support to the upcoming bad-boy comedy "Role Models" as the estranged lawyer girlfriend of Paul Rudd's character.

"I am the straight man in that," Banks says with a shrug, cheerfully noting that director David Wain gave her her "Wet Hot American Summer" break.

And after that, well, we'll see Banks again in January, in the horror flick "The Uninvited."

"Honestly, honestly, honestly, I don't have any expectations for what's happening," Banks says of her current ubiquity. "I just hope that it's a breakthrough in terms of being able to do movies that I want to do and have more say over that.

"And I'm glad to have a little more legitimacy as an actor."