“I’ve been doing a lot of playing with the boys, and I’m sort of over it,” she says. Several times, she mentions wanting to play the romantic-comedy leads that go to Reese Witherspoon and Cameron Diaz. Eight years ago, she tried writing her own female-centric comedy, called What About Barb?, about a bride whose crazy relative Barb is forced upon her as her maid of honor. There was a scatological scene in the ladies’ room in the script, but “the studio execs were like, ‘People don’t want to see girls doing that.’ And I was like, ‘I’m writing from experience! You go to a club and you have to wait in a huge line, so people double up. And, yes, you think you’re only going to take a little pee, but sometimes some poops come out.’ ” It never got made. Says Banks, “We never got the pooping scene as right as they got it in Bridesmaids.”

As we come back to the parking lot, she is significantly more relaxed from the hike. She’s not sure if she’ll be back as Avery, for which she was nominated for an Emmy. As of 30 Rock’s season finale, the character was being detained in North Korea, where she was forced to marry Kim Jong-un and read propaganda on-air. Anyway, Banks is busy. Right now, she’s got to go to Target to get diapers for Felix and buy wrapping paper for a friend’s baby shower. Then she’s got a meeting with a writer, “for one of my bad­ass female projects.”

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Correction: The original version of this article mistakenly stated that Banks worked with director Gary Ross on Secretariat. The two worked together on Seabiscuit.

Related:

• Archive: “Movie Features”
• Articles by Jada Yuan
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