Elizabeth Banks grew up in a working-class Massachusetts family knowing that she wanted to go to college and have an ambitious career. “The only thing that can stand in the way of a woman doing those things is irresponsible ejaculation and the patriarchy,” she tells Vanity Fair, laughing hard beneath a pair of rose-tinted aviator glasses.

Born in 1974, a year after the passage of Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the U.S., she found it hard to imagine that there had ever been a time pre-Roe when women didn’t have control over their reproductive choices—or that this right could be taken away in her lifetime. When Banks first read the script for the movie Call Jane, which hits theaters this Friday, she knew nothing of the Jane Collective, a group of young Chicago women who in the late 1960s and early 1970s ran a radical underground service that helped thousands of pregnant women obtain safe abortions, women who might otherwise have been extorted, maimed, or left for dead by shady abortionists. As a former member of the collective says in the recent documentary about the group, “We were building a new world, one woman at a time.”

Call Jane director Phyllis Nagy wanted her film to depict the normality of the care provided by the Janes. “Hollywood thrives on a particular sort of conflict and drama,” she says. “I understand that, but it has contributed to a terrible sense in the culture that abortion is really dangerous—it will kill you…or at the very least it will drive you crazy, you'll be guilty forever. The vast majority of people have a very different experience, so I thought, Okay, we’ll focus on the unexceptional. This is what happens every day. It's a normal part of women’s health care.”

Banks plays Joy, a fictional 1960s housewife and mother whose suburban life is disrupted when her second pregnancy triggers a life-threatening condition. After the all-male medical establishment rejects her pleas to terminate her pregnancy, she stumbles across the visionary Janes, guided by sage, older activist Virginia (Sigourney Weaver). Over the course of the film, Joy becomes an accidental activist herself, joining the Janes. “When I read this story,” says Banks, “what I saw—besides the collective and the abortion health care—was the coming of age of a woman who's 40.”

At 48, Banks is coming of age as a pop culture polymath. Some think of her as the delightful screwball comedian from 30 Rock or Modern Family; others flash back to the over-the-top Effie Trinket from the Hunger Games movies or her portrayal of a Republican feminist in Mrs. America. There’s her work as a director (most recently on the 2019 Charlie’s Angels reboot and the upcoming Cocaine Bear) and her production company, which is responsible for series like Shrill and Pitch Perfect. And on top of all that is her activism. She serves as chair of the Center for Reproductive Rights Creative Council, which—like Call Jane—works to destigmatize abortion. Banks talked to VF about taking inspiration from the Janes, Pitch Perfect’s Acapella-verse, and aging in Hollywood.

Vanity Fair: Your character in Call Jane is a white, well-off homemaker. Is the idea that she can’t be written off as irresponsible or radical—that even the most middle-of-the road women could find themselves in this situation?

Elizabeth Banks: I think that's exactly right. The majority of women who seek abortion health care are already mothers, so it was important that this person be a mom. I think the fact that she is white and privileged, and the wife of a lawyer—if even she can't figure out how to get anybody to help her in the system, how bad is it for everybody else?

Up until recently, so many portrayals of abortion in pop culture have been saturated in guilt, or the pregnancy ends in a miscarriage so that the character doesn’t have to go through with the decision.

I produced a television show based on Lindy West's memoir, Shrill. When [Lindy] was going out searching for producing partners, she was adamant that the abortion would be in the pilot episode, because it really was the start of her life. When we pitched that around Hollywood studios, everyone agreed and was fine with it. She goes home and she's smiling. [On Call Jane], Phyllis Nagy and I were very much on the same page that we were going to present the full procedure—again, to break the mythology that it is some scary life-threatening procedure when it's way less life-threatening than dental procedures. So that was really important to present the simplicity of it, the everyday nature of abortion, because if one in four women in America are getting abortions, that's pretty normal.

Your character first has an abortion and then learns how to perform them. Did you personally have to learn the basics of the procedure?

I did!

So you could actually perform terminations?

I think I might be able to, actually. I'd like to have a little more practice because I didn't actually ever get to dilate anybody—I got to learn about the tools, watch the videos. But the procedure that we performed from 1968, there are similarities to it now but it is not the exact same. And most abortions now are self-managed via two pills.

As women, we spend so many hours of life in gynecologists’ stirrups. What was it like being on the other side of it?

There was a lot of sense memory in the acting for me. It's very intimate, what women are put through. I had a procedure once [for] ovarian cysts. It was a specialized procedure that had to be done by somebody I've never met before, a male technician. He starts his procedure, no bedside manner, and it was so painful. I said, Can you please stop? It was actually making me nauseous, and I was worried I was gonna throw up. He treated me like, Can’t you just get it together? So I forced myself through this pain, through this procedure with this asshole technician in this room with no understanding of what [I’m feeling]. And then I went to my car and I bawled my fucking eyes out. And honestly, that's what I was thinking of while I was having the procedure in the movie. A pretty easy sense memory to bring up because it was raw and fresh, even though it was 10 or 11 years ago now.

That’s awful! I suspect many of us have had similar experiences. The era of Call Jane was the beginning of consciousness-raising. I remember reading that the Jane Collective used to hand out early versions of Our Bodies Ourselves because women were so disconnected from their own reproductive health. Were there any historical details you learned along the way that particularly surprised you?

Learning about how easy abortion was, it was mind-blowing to me. It made me look back at the history of pregnancy and birth in our culture—how for thousands of years, women were midwifed at home, and they passed down knowledge about it. And then suddenly men decided, Wait a minute, we want to be involved with that! And we're going to make it so that you can't deliver a baby unless you're a doctor, and you can't be a doctor unless you're a guy, because you can't go to medical school unless you're a guy. And so we just got pushed out of the most basic thing that we should be in charge of [laughs]. It just shone a light on how control over the entire reproductive process was wrested from women, slowly over time. And when you think about what that means for women's sense of themselves—it's really deep and disturbing. That's what the movie made me think about.

You wear a lot of hats in Hollywood. Right now you’re starring in Call Jane, directing the movie Cocaine Bear, and producing an upcoming Pitch Perfect series for Peacock called Bumper in Berlin. My Pitch Perfect–obsessed child wants to know if there's a possibility of a future movie in which Beca and Chloe can be together romantically.

Oh! The hashtag #Bechloe is a big deal for our fandom, and we know it. I just want them to know: You are being seen.

In other words, no to #Bechloe?

I mean, those characters, they've never been in a relationship together [laughs]. They just have a really lovely friendship and happened to be naked in the shower once. Who hasn't? But we have Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin, which was partially inspired by Marvel's Loki series. They took this villain from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and gave him this world on TV, and we thought we could do that with Bumper Allen [Adam DeVine]. He’s always been the beloved bad guy in the Pitch Perfect universe, so we thought we could give him a redemption arc story line.

So you’re expanding the Acapella-verse?

That's right, we don't have an MCU, we have ACA-U. And yes, we are always looking to figure out how to give more Pitch Perfect to fans.

You’ve evolved in the course of your career. In Hollywood, female actors were traditionally conditioned to feel like their careers were limited by age. Do you feel that changing in recent years?

There's an archetype in films called the ingenue. And the ingenue, she's in a lot of films. And, by definition, the ingenue is not 40 years old. For whatever reason, the leading man can be any age, but an ingenue can only be the age of an ingenue. That's the limiter, right? And so you just have to find other kinds of stories. Someone said to me the other day, You've really spent the last few years working with a lot more women, on Mrs. America and Shrill and this and that. And I thought, I spent my career being the one girl in the cast of guys. I don't get to be the ingenue anymore, and that's fine because I do interesting things with other women now instead.

Call Jane is very much about a women’s collective. Since the Supreme Court dismantled Roe, a lot of us have felt helpless about the situation. Do you think there’s something inspiring about seeing the Jane Collective figure find a way to take action?

We need each other, and I think that it's a very powerful and very empowering part of the storytelling in the movie. If we leave audiences with anything, it would be that. You are not alone. There are women all over this country in networks right now who will aid and abet you in your attempts to access your constitutional right to abortion health care. The Women's Health Protection Act is within reach. We need to keep the house in the midterm elections, and it will become law. And I think you cannot remind voters of that enough.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.