Actress Elizabeth Banks and husband Max Handelman have been together for 27 years ― a veritable lifetime in Hollywood years.
It’s a track record even the “Charlie’s Angels” director is impressed with. In a new interview with Porter magazine, Banks talked about her relationship with Handelman, who she met on the first day of college at the the University of Pennsylvania in the early ’90s.
“Twenty-seven years. It’s the thing I’m most proud of,” she said of her marriage. “I do think people grow together or they grow apart. We definitely grew together. We were constantly making decisions that kept us close.”
One of those decisions? Working together. The pair, who married in 2003 and have two sons together ― Felix, 8 and Magnus, 7 ― launched Brownstone Productions, a film production company, in 2002. As Banks told Porter, Handelman worked in finance on Wall Street until she “dragged him into the industry.”
“He worked an 80-hour week; I was traveling all the time in a career that requires me to film on location for up to six months of the year,” she said. “Forming the company really was about trying to combine our professional and personal goals.”
Since then, the college sweethearts have gone onto produce a number of films together, including all three “Pitch Perfect” movies and most recently a “Charlie’s Angels” reboot, which Banks directed and also stars in.
As for how they’ve kept their relationship going, Banks said it’s helped that she’s “a little traditional when it comes to marriage.”
“I think there are people that go into marriage thinking: ‘If it doesn’t work, I’ll get divorced.’ That’s not me,” she said. “You’re going to have bad moments. You’ve committed to something. Do you value it or don’t you?”
It doesn’t hurt that the pair are still really into each other. Considering what Banks told Allure in 2015, it sounds like that’s been the case from the start.
“I didn’t meet my husband and think, I’ve met the man I’m going to marry,” she told the magazine. “I was like, He’s cute. I’ll f— him, because I’m 18 and in college.”
“Really, what happened was I’ve never met anyone that I liked more,” she continued. “In the early years, did I have crushes or little interests here and there? I know my husband did, and so did I, but we stayed together. We still to this day take the long view.”
With Handelman, she said, “there’s love. And then there’s lust. So it’s great.”
Before You Go
