Elizabeth Banks and Zach Galifianakis are exploring the spiky side of the soft toy industry in their new film The Beanie Bubble on Apple TV Plus.
Set in the 80s and 90s, the film follows toy designer Ty Warner (Galifianakis) as he abandons his initial idea of posable plush Himalayan cats when he discovers that the smaller, cuter Beanie Babies are much more appealing to kids — but adults also get swept up into the Beanie craze as limited edition runs of the toys become incredibly sought-after and sell for huge amounts in online auctions.
However, Ty didn't achieve all this alone, and the film tells the story from the perspectives of three women who play a key role in his success without receiving public credit: business executive Robbie (Banks), junior employee Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan) who becomes Ty's online marketing expert, and Sheila (Sarah Snook), Ty's fiancée who, along with her daughters, becomes his unofficial advisor.
We caught up with Elizabeth and Zach to find out more...
Please note: these interviews were conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike going into effect.
Elizabeth Banks and Zach Galifianakis interview for The Beanie Bubble
How would you sum up your characters in The Beanie Bubble?
Zach: "I think Ty was the type of person, at least in this movie, where his relationship with his employees was that he was fine paying you, but don't expect to climb — 'I'll treat you okay and fair, but once you start trying to get your due, I'm not into that'. I think it's that male ego we all have to contend with. Hopefully it's a thing of the past, but in the 90s there were a lot of men taking credit for a lot of people's work! He had different interpersonal relationships [with these women], but his number one thing was I think he just didn't want anybody to be put on the same pedestal as he was. He couldn't share that space."
Elizabeth: "I felt like Robbie and I had a lot in common in that she was a very ambitious person, but had a real chip on her shoulder about her success — feeling like, was she good enough for it, was she capable enough? Fighting through her insecurity was really interesting for me, and then feeling like it wasn't even her own wall that was in her way, it was Ty. I think that realisation for her was really deep, it was emotional to go through that moment — 'I've been blaming myself when things go wrong, and actually the guy in front of me does not want me to be successful, he is putting up a blockade that I can't break through.' That broke my heart for Robbie."
How much did you know about Ty when you signed on to do this film?
Zach: "Well, the greatest challenge was that there was not a lot on him. There were very little to zero interviews with him, print or video. I was going to go as far as — he has a hotel in Santa Barbara and I was going to go see if I could see how he walked! Then the pandemic hit, and that research was off. So I had to go on gut feeling, the book [The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette], what the directors knew of him, and a little bit of my imagination of what kind of ego a person like that would have."
What do you remember of the real-life Beanie Baby craze?
Zach: "It's quite fascinating that it ever became a thing. There were a lot of people's lives that were affected by this craze, for good or for bad, and it's kind of a distant memory for a lot of people. I didn't have Beanie Babies growing up, but the story is building a toy company out of nothing because this guy had the idea [to make them] a little bit less stuffed, and that was kind of his business model, and then this amazing company comes out of it with all this capital. I think that's a pretty interesting story."
Elizabeth: "It passed me by, but I have a brother who was in school then, he's 12 years younger than me, and in the late 90s he for sure collected Beanie Babies. He probably only had about 25 of them, they were pretty hard to come by in western Massachusetts where I'm from, but he definitely had them and played with them - he wasn't precious about them! But we had dial-up internet so we weren't on eBay reselling Beanie Babies, it was not something my parents understood as an investment — my brother just felt like all the kids had them, so he had to have them too!"
There are a lot of movies being made right now about products and the people who created them. Why do you think these stories interest us so much?
Elizabeth: "I think this film highlights a specific phenomenon, which is about speculative things. At the end of the day, Ty and the company were innovators in the toy space, and they had a really interesting product. The Beanie bubble was created regardless of what Ty started out doing — he didn't set out to sell a billion dollars' worth of toys, he was pretty happy in the beginning selling $200 million worth of toys and competing with Hasbro and Mattel. So I think the craze itself speaks to a much deeper psychological thing in that people want a community, a sense of belonging, the notion that they've come up with a get-rick-quick scheme. I think what the filmmakers did really well was set this inside a larger system. This is happening right now with cryptocurrency, it's happening with any of these startups where we're all like 'this is going to be the next big thing' — and maybe it is, maybe it isn't! We're always hoping it is, but it's based on us — we give value, and we take it away."
Zach: "Nowadays, history is recorded all over the place — everybody's got a camera, everybody documents everything. Back in the 90s, that wasn't necessarily the case, there wasn't a lot of documentation. So as far as the creating of Beanie Babies, I think there was an almost Willy Wonka fantasy about how these things came to be. But we learn in the book and in the movie that's not necessarily the case."
What was it like on set being surrounded by Beanies all the time?
Elizabeth: "I actually preferred the Himalayan cats to the Beanies! They were really soft and beautiful and posable — we really did brush them and comb them and tweeze them and all of those things! I thought they were a great creation by our production team. We had to make our own Beanie Babies, we were not allowed to actually use any real Beanie Babies, so we created all kinds of weird characters. I think the production designers and the filmmakers had a grand time coming up with all these different character ideas, and sourcing the plush and the materials for them. New things showed up on set every day!"
- The Beanie Bubble will be released on Friday, July 21 in select theatres, and will be streaming globally on Apple TV+ from Friday, July 28.
