Amy Adams Has a Method to Her Acting
LOS ANGELES — Amy Adams reached into her fanny pack and fished out a stick of sunscreen. “I’m such a mom-nerd,” she apologized, as if sensing the pretense of Hollywood Glamour melt with each dab to her flush, freckled cheeks. It was a late morning in June and the sun was high; there was nothing to apologize for. But she is congenitally polite and, as she stared up at the storied observatory in Griffith Park here, on Mount Hollywood, maybe a bit self- conscious.
Ms. Adams, a f ive- time Oscar- nominated actress at 43, had begun to wonder what she must look like.
“I feel like I always … I don’t know if disappoint is the right word,” she said, zipping away the sunscreen. “But whenever people meet me they’re always like, ‘Really? That’s who you are?’ ”
She’ll star this month in the HBO mini-series “Sharp Objects,” her first television role since she began starring in features more than a decade ago. The eight- episode arc, based on the novel by Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”), marks a departure of another sort — Ms. Adams’s performance, as a hard- drinking, self- cutting journalist who returns to her provincial hometown to cover a series of mysterious murders, is among the most desolate and disquieting of her career.
“It was a whole other level,” she said. But she had been attracted to the novel’s audacious reframing of the female detective archetype.
“I like when you can take genre and turn it into its own thing,” she said. “That’s something I’m always interested in — trying to defy expectations.”
The first Amy Adams that came into view was a hungry- eyed Lolita. She was a supporting player in near-misses from the raunchy, post“Scream” teen movie explosion: the bubbly, oversexed sidekick to Kirsten Dunst in “Drop Dead Gorgeous” (1999) and a debauched social climber in “Cruel Intentions 2” (2000). She jokingly called this her “Naughty Girl” phase — the awkward early years in two abundant decades of evolution in front of the camera.
Another phase came in 2006, when she received an Oscar nomination for a big-hearted portrayal of a smalltown expectant mother in “Junebug.” This was what she refers to as the “Innocents” phase, the one in which she became one of the most famous and well-liked actresses in America.
As Giselle in the subsequent “Enchanted” (2007), she breathed exuberant life into a new wave of live-action fairy-tale movies. A second Oscar nomination followed for “Doubt” in 2009, in which her credible innocence as the nun Sister James, opposite Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, ballasts a story about the thin line between human nature and the abyss.
Another actress might have settled there, staking out a comfortable living filling in one shade of disarming ingénue or another.
But Ms. Adams has spent this decade evolving further. She turned scrappy and raw in “The Fighter” (2010), chillingly zealous in “The Master” (2012) and cunning and carnal in “American Hustle” (2013).
“Sharp Objects” consummates a new phase. Like the bereaved linguist she played in “Arrival” (2016), the journalist in the story, Camille Preaker, is adrift and rived with unresolved family trauma, suggesting what the actress identified as a “Moody and Introspective” period.
“I don’t have the same darkness and depth of internal anger, but that sort of sadness that drives you to be unkind to yourself? I think I have that,” she said of what she saw in the role.
On the trail in Griffith Park, she described a series of setbacks from her pre-“Junebug” days — canceled television series, big breaks that snapped shut — and an attendant “negative self- dialogue” that never went away. “I have this internal voice that is just not a cheerleader for myself,” she said.
To become Camille in “Sharp Objects,” she began by overpreparing — mapping the character’s existential and emotional biography until she believes that it might plausibly walk the earth.
Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed the series, said: “I noticed her voice dropped a few notes and her way of walking changed. Suddenly, it was more sloppy.’”
Ms. Adams compared her process to “catching a virus,” one that she can feel inside her body but suppress at will.
Adam McKay, director of a coming film about the life of Vice President Dick Cheney, said Ms. Adams, who plays Lynn Cheney, and Christian Bale — a reputed method actor and her previous acting partner in “The Fighter” and “American Hustle”— showed similar devotion to their characters.
This summer she will shoot a film adaptation of another mystery nov- el, “The Woman in the Window.” Like Camille, Ms. Adams’s character in the psychological thriller is another artifact of the “Moody and Introspective” era — she’ll play a mentally unstable and pathologically nosy recluse. “It must be my hormones,” she joked.
After surviving her “Innocents” phase, is there a part of her that’s running in the opposite direction?
It’s not that she regrets any of her roles, but she is hungry for a challenge. “I don’t feel any sense of pride or accomplishment if I’m not being pushed, so I’m interested in anything that will push me,” she said.
“I may succeed, I may fail, but I’ll try anything.”