Elizabeth Banks Talks Lindy’s Reaction to That Episode 5 Twist on The Miniature Wife
Banks spills the tea about what her character was really thinking in that moment.
**SPOILER WARNING! This story reveals spoilers about Peacock’s The Miniature Wife series!**
Every marriage has its ups and downs, but the love-hate union between novelist Lindy Littlejohn (Elizabeth Banks) and inventor/scientist Les Littlejohn (Matthew Macfadyen) in Peacock's new series The Miniature Wife (now streaming) is on another level.
Based on the short story of the same name from writer Manuel Gonzales, this darkly comedic series adaptation charts two decades of dysfunction simmering between the Littlejohns. Their mutual ire finally hits a terrible boiling point when Les shrinks Lindy to six inches tall (literally) and hides her away in a dollhouse over the holiday season.
Showrunners Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner (Goliath, Boardwalk Empire) mashed up a gender-inverted The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) with The War of the Roses (1989) to land the tart tone of this project. Every episode reveals new secrets, but arguably there’s no matching what Lindy discovers at the end of the fifth episode, titled “Delusional.”
Peacock Blog chatted with the showrunners, Ames and Turner, and leading lady Banks to get their take on the twist that drives the second half of the season. Read what they say, below.
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Elizabeth Banks talks Les Littlejohn's betrayal in The Miniature Wife
In the first half of The Miniature Wife, viewers come to know the Littlejohn marriage via flashbacks and present day events. It becomes clearer and clearer how they evolved from supportive and loving to a red-flag example of the perils of narcissism and terrible communication. At this point in their two-decade marriage, Lindy is paralyzed by writer’s block. And she's grown resentful of Les’ obsession with creating a “cellular restoration” formula that will revolutionize the "agro-tech" sector and make him a scientific legend.
By the episode “Delusional,” Les has committed a pile of deal-breaker moves against Lindy. First, he “mistakenly” shrunk her in the first episode, despite not having a way to safely restore anything he shrinks. Then, he placed her in their grown daughter’s dollhouse and stocked it with all her shrunken possessions that he “gifted” her over the past year. It’s only when his livid mother confronts Les about his horrid, controlling choices that he admits to Lindy (via voicemail) that he intentionally shrunk her because he was afraid she would leave him forever.
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Considering that both Les and Lindy then try to murder one another a lot as they barrel towards the finale, Peacock Blog asked Banks how she mentally justified Lindy’s path to forgiveness.
"I think that the forgiveness only happens when Les sacrifices himself,” Banks said of his grand gesture to also shrink himself in the final episode, titled "A Tiny Big Idea.” “At that point [she’s] selfishly just trying to get big and will support the endeavor of getting big again, but it has nothing to do with Les at that point. I think it's all about her own survival."
In fact, Lindy has quite the rant against reconciling with Les in the final episode, which seems to signal the end of the Littlejohn marriage. But Banks said Les being willing to test his restoration formula on himself turns the emotional tides.
"She doesn't trust him at all. He's lost any goodwill that she had for him,” Banks emphasized. "I think it's not until he's in the bathtub hoping that he doesn't die that she actually thinks this might be the man that I married."
The Miniature Wife writers explain Lindy’s tiny astronaut buddy
After Lindy settles in for a binge-watch of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in the second episode and gets increasingly stir crazy being locked in her own hell house, she starts talking to a shrunken astronaut action figure. Curious, we asked the showrunners how they came up with Lindy's friend.
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Co-creator Ames said the astronaut action figure was initially their idea of a comfort gift from Les: “If Les was going to leave her in the dollhouse, he might want to leave her a little buddy. And that then evolved into, almost like, she needed a 'Wilson' from Castaway" (i.e.: the disembodied soccer ball that Tom Hanks talks to in the 2000 film).
“Really, it's just a projection of herself, her inner voice and her own conscience,” Ames continued. “And we just thought it would be really fun to have something that she could interact with as well; that was there for her when she needed it and then would eventually turn its back on her."
Stream The Miniature Wife on Peacock as of Thursday, April 9.
