Elizabeth Banks Is Starting a Book Club Exclusively for Drinking Wine

“If you’re a female famous person and you don’t have a book club, are you actually famous?” quips Elizabeth Banks, closing the novel in her hands and taking off her glasses. “No! Of course not.” It’s a clip from a promo video introducing her own, not-entirely-traditional venture: The Elizabeth Banks Book Club.

But, plot twist, there aren’t actually any books to read in this one—that is, apart from the made-up titles (such as Thirty-Four Things You Shouldn’t Put in a Blender, Things Horses Don’t Care About, and How to Play The Violin Despite Your IBS), which serve merely as a clever and cheeky wink, a light introduction or preface, if you will, to cut to the chase and get to the wine-drinking portion of the gathering, which is, for Banks, what book clubs are all about. “Wine and community,” she says over a Zoom call.

The wine, specifically in terms of Archer Roose. The actor-writer-producer-director (the latter two for the recent comedy thriller Cocaine Bear) joined the affordable luxury and low-intervention wine brand as chief creative officer and co-owner in 2021, and loved the disruptive nature of wine in a can. “If there’s one word that I wanted to use for me as a performer and an entertainer, I’d like to be accessible,” she says. “I like to be somebody who audiences trust to entertain them and have a good time. And to me, that’s what this wine also said.”

Established in 2015 by Marian Leitner-Waldman and her husband David, Archer Roose entered Banks’ world in 2020, and she quickly became enamored by the way it didn’t take itself too seriously. “I’ve definitely felt a little wine-shamed in my life,” she says of the culture, which she finds can be “snooty” and “inexplicably expensive.” But with Archer Roose, she says, “it felt very authentic to who I am as an accessible artist.”

The idea to then come up with a non-book book club—which gets quite meta when you really think about it—in conjunction also seemed appropriate. “Most women I know who are in book clubs also drink wine with their book club,” she says. But as many of us know, life can often get in the way of reading the requisite book. “I’ve been a bad book club member, that’s for sure,” confesses Banks, sometimes not finishing the book. She recounts how, among the personal book club she’s been in since around the millennium, there have been times when “all of us working moms were like ‘Hey, should we just read an article?! And let’s talk about the article’” instead. And, on another occasion, “we just went to my friend’s house, sat in a hot tub, talked a little bit about the book, but mostly discussed our kids and husbands and then just drank a lot of wine, and sat around in robes. So, you know, that’s the kind of book club I’m interested in,” she says, noting she has never officially had a book club along the lines of Reese Witherspoon, Oprah, or Natalie Portman. It was a eureka moment. “What if there was a book club but it was really just about the wine?”

Which, now it is. Each month, via Archer Roose’s Instagram, she will post fake book suggestions—the idea being that it’s a good excuse to have a “book club,” Elizabeth Banks style. All that said, Banks did indulge us in some suggestions for wine and book pairings, should you want to pick up that book as well as your glass. See and shop them below.