Madeline FassThe actress and producer invites us to Montana, where she conveys a mix of confidence and candor, opening up about morally questionable characters, juggling fame and motherhood, and Saturdays spent in the mountains with her family.
It’s the fifth shot of the day, but Biel’s face (jetlagged as she is, having just landed from Budapest two nights prior) shows no signs of fatigue. A sunbeam casts her in a warm glow; a camera shutter snaps. The resulting photograph is reminiscent of Diana, the Roman goddess of nature. In paintings, Diana is often depicted with a quiver on her back and a deer by her side, so associated is she with the wild. Diana is also considered the epitome of the sacred feminine. It’s a duality that strikes me as quite Biel-esque. Biel has previously been named one of the most beautiful women in the world and the sexiest. She is undoubtedly attractive, her eyes a mesmerizing shade of green. Still, the 43-year-old seems as comfortable here, in the countryside, as she does in the spotlight; an outdoors enthusiast who grew up skiing in Colorado, and who has set up a second home with her husband, Justin Timberlake, and two sons right in Yellowstone’s backyard.
After nearly 30 years of knowing of Jessica Biel (she rose to fame, as I’m sure you’ll remember, as Mary Camden on 7th Heaven, a role she originated at just 14), people think they know her. They read about her online and rewatch films like The A-Team and Valentine’s Day and make assumptions. But much like the complicated women she’s portrayed lately—Cora in The Sinner, the titular character in Hulu’s Candy, Chloe in Amazon Prime’s forthcoming The Better Sister—Biel is more layered than audiences may perceive her to be. She’s a deft Emmy-nominated actress, a powerhouse producer, an owner of multiple businesses, and an attentive working mom.
Bringing me to Montana isn’t necessarily about inviting me to see her authentic self, though certainly I do. (She arrives to our coffee date the morning of InStyle’s photoshoot wearing a nondescript black hoodie, gray beanie, no makeup, and a simple gold wedding band, her equally dressed-down husband beside her.) It’s more about the reality of balancing work and family: After months spent shooting internationally, she’s eager to be back home. And also she has a project to promote.
Trudeau grabbed his own order before hammering out the details of their day and kissing Biel goodbye. She and I take our coffees to-go (me: a golden latte; her: an oat milk cappuccino) and ride the gondola halfway up Eglise peak. It’s a warm mid-April day, and while there is fresh snow on the ground, only a handful of people are out on the slopes—her sons, 10-year-old Silas and 4-year-old Phineas, among them. As we settle into a cozy corner of the lodge where the gondola deposits us, Biel keeps peering out the expansive windows to the bunny hill beyond, looking for her kids.
“Spending time with the family unit is a huge priority right now, because I’ve been gone, Justin’s been gone,” she says, adding that if she weren’t here with me this Saturday morning, working, then she’d probably be out skiing with Trudeau, getting a few runs in together before picking up the boys from ski school and spending the afternoon on the mountain with them. “These moments at this time feel kind of priceless.” Biel has been in production almost the entirety of the last year. First, on The Better Sister, a murder-mystery thriller co-starring Elizabeth Banks, which will premiere on May 29; then on Matchbox, Mattel’s follow-up to Barbie, sure to be one of next summer’s most hotly anticipated blockbusters, which took her to Morocco, Slovakia, and Hungary.
In The Better Sister, on which Biel also serves as a producer, she plays the seemingly perfect Chloe: enviable magazine editor, married with a teenage son and living in a sprawling apartment overlooking Central Park with the wardrobe to match. (Biel based her character on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Anna Wintour.) Banks is her estranged sister, Nicky, a disheveled recovering addict stuck in the small town where they grew up. But who, exactly, is the better sister is a question whose answer ping-pongs back and forth across the series’ eight episodes. When Chloe’s husband is murdered within the first few minutes of episode one (no spoilers here; it’s in the logline), the myriad twists and turns begin.
“I initially read it and thought, Oh, this is thought-out, because you keep dropping these little pebbles. Oh my gosh, another bombshell just exploded. Oh, there’s another bombshell, you know?” Biel recalls. “It keeps you salivating for more—this kind of soapy, quirky, funny, dark, traumatic story.” The team behind The Better Sister originally reached out to Biel about the role of Nicky. A week or so later they called back to offer her Chloe. “I realized that I was even more well-suited for that character, even though I was really excited about that more wild and, sort of, balls-out character, as Nicky is. … The universe just kind of opens up the right way, if you can flow with it. I think about moments in my career—I auditioned for The Notebook; [it’s] one of those ones that got away. What would my career have been like if I had the opportunity to do that movie? Clearly that one wasn’t meant for me.”
Becoming Chloe required a dramatic transformation: severing her long waves for a razor-sharp bob. “It says a lot about that woman, that super severe haircut, that very specific dress, how she’s moving through that party,” Biel says of Chloe’s appearance in the very first scene. “It was important to have that kind of physical image, because the control element of Chloe is the thing that she holds on to to make sure that she can survive these lies and survive these choices that she’s made in the past that haunt her; one stray hair out of place, and the whole thing could come unraveling.” Bobs are having a bit of a cultural moment. I bring up Chris McMillan styling Leslie Bibb’s hair for The White Lotus, a cut he called “c*nty.” Biel hasn’t seen the viral reel, but she cracks a smile at the thought. “I love Leslie’s hair in that show. … I could say [Chloe’s] in that category. Those two characters, they would be friends.”
The Better Sister is descended from a long line of serpentine psychological drama miniseries, The Sinner and Candy among them, but also Big Little Lies, The Undoing, and The Night Of. It lives up, with the right amount of red herrings, improbable coincidences, and wry one-liners—mostly as Biel and Banks lean into the sibling dynamic. At its heart, The Better Sister is a show about two disparate yet interconnected women trying to figure out how to navigate life’s traumas together.
“Elizabeth is a dynamic, incredible human. More than anything, we just had a lot of fun—fun sparring with each other every day, kind of being bitchy to each other,” says Biel, adding that they fell into their roles as older/younger sister naturally. “I adore her, and I think she adores me too. We had a great friendship off-camera.”
I have the opportunity to speak with Banks over the phone in early May. She couldn’t agree more, noting that the actresses bonded over being boy moms and maintained the sororal vibes off-set with highly competitive games of Padel on the weekends. “I felt that we were really well cast, and I trusted her right away. I think there was a lot of mutual respect all the way around. I think she’s a great talent, and so committed,” says Banks, who was intrigued by the idea of sisters at the center of a murder mystery. “We fell into a mode really fast where we just didn’t want to disappoint each other. I could just tell we were going to bring out the best in each other. And we really did.”
Biel doesn’t have any biological sisters (she has a younger brother, Justin), but tells me about the “chosen sisters” she’s collected throughout her life: five women she bonded with while they were undergrads at Tufts University, with whom she still does girls trips and family trips; her best friend from fourth grade in Colorado; her producing partner and “closest friend for 20-odd years,” Michelle Purple. “I’m really lucky, because I have amazing groups of women kind of scattered throughout the country that have really been my rocks as I’ve grown up.”
“I would also consider my husband one of my chosen sisters,” Biel adds with a chuckle. The next part is earnest: “He’s also my best friend. All of them together have gotten me through my life. I don’t know how I would have survived life without them.”
Her support system—and the privilege it is to have one—is something Biel acknowledges several times over the course of our two-hour conversation. “It really takes a village to raise any kid, let alone in a wild business like this where parents are traveling for long times for work,” she says. The goal in the Biel-Timberlake household is to alternate which parent is away—“sometimes we do a good job; we try to have one of us working full time, only one”—an effort to provide their children a sense of stability. “It doesn’t always happen, because the opportunities arise and the timing is what it is. You just have to take advantage of it.”
This summer, Biel and the boys will “dip in and out” of the final leg of Trudeau’s tour. “It’s nice to give him some support,” she says. “It sounds so glamorous, tour life. It’s so lonely. They just go from hotel to airplane to car to hotel to venue to airplane to car. There’s a lot of recovery required to sing and dance. What they do on stage—his entire team—I’m in awe of these people.”
When she and her husband are both home, it’s a game of logistics. “We’re doing the same thing every other parent is doing: ‘Okay, tennis. You got the tennis? I’ll get the thing,’” she explains to me as we cruise back down the gondola. Just then, as if orchestrated by some cosmic force, Biel spots Silas and Phineas coming up with their ski instructor.
“My kids are right here!” she squeals. She’s waving and knocking on the window, but they don’t see her. A support beam blocks their view. “Oh, we’re gonna miss them,” she sighs as we continue our journey to the base.
“It’s so hard,” she says of managing the working mom juggle. “I don’t do it very well all the time.” Following something of a critical and creative lull in the mid-2010s, Biel’s career began to pick back up not long after her older son was born. “My producing partner, Michelle, she said one thing to me a long time ago. She goes, ‘Listen, all you can do is: When you’re working, you’re 100-percent working, and when you’re home, you’re 100-percent home. Do not take a work call when you’re at home with the kids. If you do it half-ass, you’re not good at anything.’ That was a good piece of advice.”
Still, that frequently means she’s either parenting or working, with little time for much else. “I do feel like I’m often at the bottom of the totem pole, even though my husband is the best at trying to always help encourage me to take time for myself.” Exercise is her first choice activity when she gets those moments of solitude, calling it as much of an aspect of her mental wellbeing as it is her physical. She gets overwhelmed, she catastrophizes. “I’m just a grumpy person.” She needs to move.
For as genuinely, globally famous as Biel and her husband are, they tend to keep a low profile. Biel is unassuming, soft-spoken, and surprisingly open. She posts on social media to her nearly 14 million followers with some regularity—and often a naturally dry wit—but in a (largely) promotionally professional sort of way. “I still think there’s something to be said about keeping a little bit of a mystique. Maybe that sounds crazy. It probably does, because I’m from a different generation, and that was part of what I was taught in this business: You don’t share everything. You share some things, and you keep a little mystery going on. It’s part of the smoke and mirrors of being in the entertainment business. We don’t do that anymore. We tell everybody everything, and there’s something really freeing about that, and refreshing. I understand that side of it, too,” she says. “I still feel like your private life is your private life, and that’s okay.”
She’s grateful not to be starting out in this business as a 14-year-old today. “I don’t know if I would have survived it. You remember what it was like to be a teenager: You think you have it together. You make these huge mistakes. When we were teenagers”—Biel and I are both elder Millennials—“it was okay to fail. Nobody can fail anymore. You make one small, whatever, error, mistake, something that you feel you could have done differently, and you can just get blasted for it. It’s a really crazy thing that’s happening for young people, because failure is so much a part of that growing up stage.”
I reflect on Biel’s mindset and the conundrum I face myself as a parent—as many parents, I’m sure, do—of the seemingly innocent desire to share adorable moments of my toddler with friends and family online, but then knowing those photos or videos, that information, will just exist on the vast and sometimes nefarious internet. For someone like Biel, the dilemma is exponentially greater.
“It’s a tricky one, a tricky balance. We do really try hard not to expose them in a way that they’re not comfortable with,” she says. Last summer, while Biel was in New York shooting The Better Sister, she brought Silas to the US Open tennis tournament. Because she and Timberlake have kept their sons’ lives private, the media jumped to cover the rare appearance. “My son was 9 at the time, and he’s a huge tennis fan—that’s his sport, that’s what he plays. We had this opportunity, and we talked about it. We talked about photographers. You know, ‘Are you comfortable with that?’ He can’t make these decisions on his own, but at this point, we can at least discuss what’s his opinion around it.” Ultimately, Biel chose to enjoy the mother-son date. “You really want to give your kids every experience. I don’t know if it was the right decision, to be honest with you, but he and I had a good time. … It’s scary every time. But it’s also their life. And so it’s this really tricky, tricky thing to figure out, what’s appropriate.”
She wants to try to shield them long enough that they can come to a conclusion about engaging with social media and the traditional media when they’re old enough. She feels similarly about them engaging with Hollywood. With both parents in the entertainment business, it’s not surprising that the kids would show an interest in the performing arts—and an aptitude. “If he was a kid actor, he’d probably work all the time,” she says of Silas’s natural abilities. Letting him pursue them, though, is something she and Trudeau are torn over. She encourages his love for the craft, but would prefer he spend his childhood learning and training. “‘And when you’re 18 years old, you want to be professional? Have at it. That’s your choice.’ That’s what I would like to hold on to, if possible, for him, you know?”
The professional churn is something Biel knows well, having worked since 1996. (“I’m a living dinosaur in this business, truly,” she says self-deprecatingly.) She looks back on 7th Heaven with nothing but fondness: “What I remember most, probably, is the camaraderie of all the kids,” she says. Biel has maintained a particular friendship with Beverley Mitchell, who played the middle Camden sister, Lucy, despite being a year older than Biel. Mitchell co-hosts a 7th Heaven nostalgia podcast, and Biel was a recent guest. I ask her about a quote from the episode, that she was “secretly a little afraid of Beverley.” She laughs. “I say this with all the love in the world—because I love her—She was tough, man. … I pushed her buttons. It was such a sisterly relationship. I think I did it because I looked up to her and I loved her. We got under each other’s skin in the best way possible.”
The nine-month-long shoots were like acting bootcamp, where she learned the fundamentals. Avuncular camera operators taught her essential, but non-obvious, skills, like how to stand up from a chair smoothly. “The ability to have that longevity and stamina, that’s a huge part of what I can do kind of easily, because it’s what I did ever since I was little. I definitely work with people now who talk about, ‘Man, these hours are long’ and ‘Man, this is a long schedule.’ And I’m like, ‘Is it?’”
After 7th Heaven, Biel was cast in a string of action flicks and romantic comedies. She found herself constantly “playing the girlfriend.” “It felt creatively uninteresting,” she says. “It was at a time when men’s stories were really important. Where’s my Mad Men? It just felt like a bummer, like, When is somebody going to see that I have more to offer them?”
Biel decided to show them herself. While working on Stealth (2005), she met producer Michelle Purple. The two became fast friends and started watching movies together after hours, talking about what made a film work or not, what made a performance compelling or not; they found they had similar sensibilities. Biel, at just 22 years old, proposed the idea of starting their own company, with the goal (at least one of them) of developing meatier roles for herself. At first, Purple said no—“I wanted to make sure I didn’t look like her friend who wanted to produce,” she tells me—but, “I realized this girl has so many more layers and talents than she’d been able to show. At that time, she was ‘the pretty action girl.’ You can be the greatest actor in the world, but if you’re not given the part, you can’t [show] it,” Purple says.
They launched Iron Ocean Productions in 2007. Back then, actress–led production companies were not a thing. Drew Barrymore had Flower Films, yes, but this is before Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine (2016) or Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment (2014) or the countless others that have launched in the last decade or so. “We didn’t make anything for, like, 10 years. It was a very, very hard time,” Biel says. “It was a time when women’s stories were not really being championed at all.” She treated it as a learning experience, honing in on what it means to be a producer. Biel recalls pushing the dolly, working craft services, script writing, cutting things together in post. “I call her my super student,” Purple jokes. “This isn’t a vanity company for her. She does the work.”
Eventually, they found The Sinner, which earned Biel Critics Choice and Emmy nominations for her performance as Cora, a murderous housewife whose motives are unknown even to her, plus Golden Globe nods for herself and Iron Ocean. They’ve since gone on to produce Candy, Cruel Summer, The Better Sister, “The Lost Olympians” podcast, and inked a first-look deal with Paramount Television Studios, which was renewed in 2022. “Luckily, it’s worked out,” says Biel of her and Purple’s gamble in the aughts. Throughout the crests and nadirs, they’ve put their friendship first. “We have been through so many of life’s ups and downs together,” says Purple, “from, now, having kids and going on this journey and marriage and all of it, our friendship is really important to us. We have the honest conversations with each other. There’s no filter. I don’t think I have a secret from her and, I believe, vice versa.”
The Sinner was an inflection point for Biel. Finally, an opportunity to play the kind of complex character she’d been “fighting and advocating for myself for many, many years,” she says. It’s a genre she loves, too, as a viewer. “I kind of got that taste in my mouth for, like, really psychologically complicated, super dark ladies making some very questionable decisions. It’s so fun and interesting to attempt to understand this type of human behavior. And audiences will take the ride with me.” The Better Sister’s Chloe is one such woman, and Biel plays her with nuance and range. One early scene has stuck with me: Chloe, irritated by her sister’s presence, stress eats a pastry over the kitchen sink. The move is diametrically opposed to the persona Chloe has created for herself, and it feels raw and relatable, that moment of vulnerability.
With Matchbox, however, Biel is making some sharp turns—literally and figuratively. In it, she plays a Small Town USA car-enthusiast, who, together with her friends, finds herself in the middle of a wild, global adventure. A week before I meet up with Biel in Montana, she hops on a Zoom call during her final days on set. “Fast, cool driving with Mustangs and friendship,” is her abbreviated summary of the film. Biel does much of her own free driving. “I have two incredible female stunt drivers, Amanda Bradley and Viki Bauer—they’re the best in the world. They taught me all kinds of confidence in these cars,” she effuses. “I can skid to a mark. I can do a 180. I can do a 90. I can do all this crazy stuff that I never knew how to do before.”
“I will always be interested in psychological dramas. I can’t help myself,” she says. On the other hand, she doesn’t want her work to grow stale. “Matchbox was the perfect opportunity to do something so different from what I’ve been doing, and kind of reminiscent of what I used to do in my 20s, when I was doing, like, big boy action movies. It’s been a breath of fresh air to have a completely different kind of performance. …A different creative experience.”
It didn’t hurt that John Cena leads the cast. “My kids are big fans, which is another reason I was like, Maybe I should do this movie. Probably they’re gonna think I’m super cool,” she says with a laugh.
With so many plates spinning at once—Biel also has a children’s healthcare line, KinderFarms, and launched a wine label, Prophet & Poet, with her brother, sister-in-law, and three friends—she would be forgiven for choosing to simply ride off into the Montana sunset. “I still have a lot of big goals,” she tells me. “I still have a lot more that I’m curious if I’m capable of doing, that I think could be really interesting and also add a whole other layer to the work I’ve done in the past.” She’s grateful that post-Sinner, she’s been given more interesting opportunities, ones that have allowed her to stretch her creative boundaries. She’s humble, but hungry for more.
“I’m still not working with [some of] the A-list directors of my dreams, you know? So, I don’t feel like, Done it. Did it. What more can I do?,” she says with mock jadedness. “I feel like I have so much more to go, not in a weird, dysfunctional way, just like, Man, there’s a lot of people I haven’t been able to work with that I want to work with.” I ask her to name names, tell her we’ll put it out into the universe. “I love a good manifestation. David Fincher,” she answers, “he’s one of my favorites, favorite favorites. And so many actresses that are incredible—the Helen Mirrens of the world, the Olivia Colmans of the world.” She continues: “And then, I haven’t worked with almost any women that are peers of mine besides Elizabeth [Banks]. Now it’s stories about sisters and families and friendships, so I’m hoping for more of that in the future. What more ladies can I work with?”
She’s been writing some, and would like to pursue it in earnest, though she recognizes that sounds reductive. She’d like to do comedy, or a sweeping romance, or sci-fi. She’s signed on for a movie called Batso, which is based on the true story of the first climbers up Yosemite’s El Capitan. “That’s like this world”—she nods to the Rocky Mountains just outside—“which is another thing I would love to do.”
“It’s such a delicate business, one thing goes away and everything falls apart,” she says. “People have to trust and take risks. You gotta risk it for the biscuit. That’s a new thing Justin and I are saying: ‘You gotta risk it for the biscuit.’ I don’t even know what it means, like, tangibly,” she says, laughing.
Whatever she does next, biscuits are almost certainly coming her way. She is—like the fictional Chloe, like the goddess Diana, like all of us—a woman of contradictions. And who doesn’t want to see more of that?
Credits
- Photographer
- Celeste Sloman
- Stylists
- Rob & Mariel
- Makeup Artist
- Kara Yoshimoto Bua
- Hair Stylist
- Anh Co Tran
- Location
- Lone Mountain Ranch
Johanna Liander
Sophie Rosemont
Alexis Parker
Amandine Lhoste