NEW YORK, NY – I didn’t expect to start my morning playing a game of “Never Have I Ever” with Elizabeth Banks. But there I was at a hotel restaurant in SoHo with a group of 15 women, all sharing intimate details of our sexual health.
The "Hunger Games" and "Pitch Perfect" actress, 52, is a longtime women’s health advocate, and she's using her platform to champion reproductive freedom and health care access. She’s teamed up with Cadence OTC, a brand providing over-the-counter access to emergency contraception and urinary-tract infection (UTI) relief. She is an investor in the company.
“I’ve traveled the world, and I felt like the system for birth control here just didn’t match up with women’s lived reality,” she tells me over coffee in the restaurant’s courtyard.
Banks just spent six months in Canada filming her new comedy-drama Peacock series, “The Miniature Wife,” which also taps into themes of women’s autonomy and “the minimization of wants and needs,” she explains.
When Banks tried to renew her birth control in Canada – which she uses to manage menopause symptoms – her doctor back home said she could only get it one month at a time, and needed to call her doctor every three months for prescription refills.
