What to expect from Elizabeth Banks? A hunger for more

With roles in 'The Hunger Games,' 'What to Expect When You're Expecting' and 'People Like Us,' a producing gig and her own blog, the actress blazes an eclectic path.

In her early 20s, Elizabeth Banks filmed a commercial for the clear malt liquor Zima in which she played three different possible dates: a preppy girl, a tomboy and — once the booze started flowing — a fantasy vixen in a latex nurse's costume.
Now 38, Banks has outlasted the adult beverage (it was discontinued in 2008), but the booze ad foreshadowed an acting career filled with eclectic, gung-ho characters — and she's more in demand than ever. Just consider her roles in three studio movies in the last four months:
In the dystopian blockbuster "The Hunger Games,"Banks cheerfully chaperones child gladiators into the ring; in the pregnancy comedy "What to Expect When You're Expecting," she crusades for breastfeeding as the manic proprietor of a maternity boutique; and in the family drama"People Like Us," which opened over the weekend, she's a single mom navigating her father's secret history with wit and resilience.
PHOTOS: "People Like Us" red carpet premiere
In a recent interview over salad and tea in Beverly Hills, Banks was a bubbly raconteur on subjects high and low — campaigning for President Obama, obsessing over Girl Scout cookies, surviving a Roman Catholic upbringing, penning a masters thesis on Tennessee Williams' "Summer and Smoke."
"I've been feisty for a long time, basically, always looking for an angle," she said.
That earthiness is a quality that serves her well as Frankie, a recovering alcoholic in "People Like Us."
A rare cinematic look at the meaning of the sibling bond, "People Like Us" is the heavily fictionalized story of its writer-director, Alex Kurtzman, who met his half-sister for the first time when he was 30. In the movie, Chris Pine plays Sam, a young man who must deliver an inheritance to a sister he never knew he had — Banks' Frankie. Kurtzman's writing partner, Roberto Orci, and college friend, actor Jody Lambert, also collaborated on the screenplay.