Elizabeth Banks says the spouses in "The Miniature Wife" were isolated from each other even before one of them physically shrinks the other.

Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen star in "The Miniature Wife," premiering Thursday. Photo courtesy of Peacock UPI Elizabeth Banks attends the premiere of Peacock's series "The Miniature Wife" at the DGA Theater Complex in Los Angeles on Monday. Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI UPI Left to right, Zoe Lister-Jones, Elizabeth Banks, Matthew Macfadyen and Sofia Rosinsky attend the premiere of Peacock's TV series "The Miniature Wife" at the DGA Theater Complex in Los Angeles on Monday. File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI UPI

NEW YORK, April 9 (UPI) -- The Better Sister, Pitch Perfect and The Hunger Games alum Elizabeth Banks says the spouses at the heart of her new dramedy, The Miniature Wife, were isolated from each other even before one of them physically shrinks the other.

Premiering Thursday on Peacock, the series is based on a short story by Miguel Gonzalez and follows bio-agritech scientist Les (Matthew Mavfadyen) as he accidentally shrinks his Pulitzer Prize-winning wife LIndy and must race against time to find a way to reverse the procedure, while she fights off bugs, animals and household appliances in an effort to stay alive.

"They're on a rocky road and headed towards divorce. But, I think they're trying, not too sincerely or successfully, but trying," Banks, 52, told UPI in a Zoom interview Tuesday.

"The other thing that's going on is that, secretly, Les is actually very close to an incredible breakthrough that he's not sharing with his wife at all."

Succession Emmy winner Macfadyen added: "That makes him think everything's going to be OK. Once that happens, everything will be fine."

"But I have no idea it's even close," Banks countered.

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"I'm just completely off in my own world at this point. So, I like to say that this show was presented to us as sort of The War of the Roses, if one of them was six inches tall and, then, this is a couple in competition that needs to get back to partnership," she added. "That's where you will find them, hopefully, by the end."

Banks said she sees Lindy's miniaturization as a metaphor for how inconsequential she feels in Les' eyes.

"They're literally not living in the same world and, not only that, he's made her feel small and diminished and like what she cares about doesn't matter to him and, so, now that feels even bigger and grander," she explained.

"I loved that whole idea of, 'We're going to make those feelings literal,' and the literalness of them is going to enhance everything that the audience is feeling for this couple."

"It will push them towards resolving [their relationship] one way or another," Macfadyen noted.

"It's like she becomes the crisis that they have to deal with in the moment. They can't avoid it and put it off anymore," Banks said. "And they've clearly been avoiding repairing their relationship, but now they have to repair this, or she might be dead."

Macfadyen thinks the show's themes will resonate with viewers.

"It's about family -- daughters, sons, fathers, mothers," he said.

"So much about my sense of isolation and feeling small started with my mother and our icy relationship and his father, you come to find out, didn't validate him in the way that his brothers got validated," Banks said. "It's sort of about, 'How are we going to break this series of traumas and not pass it on to our own daughter?' All of that is super relatable stuff."

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"There is also adjacent stuff like ego and ambition, and tech and science," Macfadyen added.

Because of their supposed size discrepancies, the actors didn't actually film many of their scenes together.

The stars helped each other prepare, however, and their characters' interactions were flawlessly stitched together in the editing room.

"We would run scenes together," Macfadyen recalled.

"We read it. We sort of had a rhythm that we understood from each other and then, we had the benefit of, whoever went first in the scene work, got to watch the video reference," Banks said.

"They would pull takes of his to show me, 'This is what he did in the master or the close- ups,' and, so, we could really sort of put it into our mind's eye what I was looking at, what my perspective was, how he read the lines and, then, we had wonderful readers that studied what we did and sort of helped us do it when we were not together, which was a lot of the time."

One of Banks' favorite props from the show was a six-foot-tall Hershey chocolate bar.

"It was actually edible and I got to nibble on that for days at a time," Banks said.

"I liked you being obliterated by the water hose," Macfadyen quipped. "That was just wonderful."

"Oh, that was so funny," Banks laughed.

The show also co-stars Zoe Lister-Jones, O-T Fagbenle and Sofia Rosinsky.