Actress and director Elizabeth Banks defended a controversial scene depicting 12-year-olds doing cocaine in her upcoming R-rated flick “Cocaine Bear,” telling Variety’s Adam B. Vary in a recent interview that the scene was all about testing their “innocence.”
“It was definitely controversial,” she said. “There were conversations about, should we age up these characters? We all kind of held hands, and we were like, ‘Guys, they’ve got to be 12.’ It’s their innocence being tested. That’s what was interesting to me about that scene.”
Christopher Miller, one of the Banks’ co-producers for the film, also defended the scene, arguing that “the naïveté of the kids” makes it “OK.”
“It’s what makes it so tense and funny. It doesn’t work if they’re teenagers. It has to be that age where you don’t know anything, but you want to pretend like you do,” Miller added.
ELIZABETH BANKS CLAIMS HOLLYWOOD SHOWS ‘BIZARRE’ SEXISM TOWARD FEMALE FILMMAKERS: ‘WOMEN DON’T LIKE MATH’
The upcoming action-comedy film, set to debut worldwide on February 24, focuses on a cocaine-fueled black bear’s druggy rampage in a Georgia forest and is loosely based on a real-life story of a bear discovered in The Peach State’s…
