Actors felt the darkness in Sharp Objects
Amy Adams wasn’t sure where her anxiety ended and her character’s began
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.— Actress Amy Adams was suffering from insomnia. It had nothing to do with her family or her career. It was brought on by her role as the liquor-swigging Camille in HBO’s limited series Sharp Objects.
Adams plays a reporter who is forced to return to her small hometown in Missouri to report on two missing young girls. Her overbearing mother and the dark recesses of her past collide with the mysterious case she is following.
It’s a dark journey that proved difficult, says Adams. “There’s a closeness that either existed or became during the shooting,” she says. “So that helped us through sort of the darkness of the subject matter.
“For me, family is the most grounding thing. So going home to my daughter and my husband, and making dinner or doing something very domestic always helps me reground myself and get me back into my own reality,” she says.
“I had really bad insomnia and I would wake up with anxiety, and I’d have to realize that I didn’t own it,” Adams adds. “It belonged to Camille. So, I’d have these very insane conversations with myself at 4 o’clock in the morning … trying to decide what was my anxiety and what was Camille’s, and what I needed to let go of and what could work the next day.”
The closeness she leaned on was her camaraderie with her co-stars, including Emmy winner Patricia Clarkson, who plays her unyielding mother.
“I think that was what saved us, in a way, is we were quite close off-camera,” recalls Clarkson. “So we had these traumatic days — very traumatic days — and then we would drink fake alcohol on the set, and then have real alcohol when we would be done … We love each other. I mean we had a great closeness.”
Eliza Scanlen, who plays Camille’s half-sister, says she struggled with the haunting project. “I definitely felt crazy,” she says. “I think being away from home — I’m from Sydney (Australia), and I had to travel for this project — and similarly, family is the most grounding thing for me. And not having my whole family there was difficult at times,” she says.
“But I always had someone with me and I think that saved me, definitely. But also, I was kind of forced to find other things that grounded me. And I think one of the most helpful things for me was just finding a sense of routine within all the chaos,” she says.
“I’m very much an A-type personality. So this career is probably not the best for me in that sense … It was very much a learning process for me and having such incredible people around me, I think, really helped. I felt very safe, which I think is the most important thing.” Executive producer and showrunner Marti Noxon, who adapted Gillian Flynn’s book for the series, says, “What I love about Camille and a lot of the women in this town, is that they don’t talk about trauma. They don’t talk about things that have happened to them. They get up every day, put on their armour, and then they go do their lives. And there is something that I thought was so powerful about that,” she says.
“I think a lot of people — not just women, just people — can relate to this idea of you’re hiding the damage that you feel from everybody around you. And yet, you just go on. And a lot of times, people might say to you, ‘I can’t believe that’s you. That doesn’t seem like you.’ And, to me, Camille was that ultimate character, where you wouldn’t believe unless you saw her without her clothes on, that she was damaged at all.” Much of the mood of impending doom is conjured by the direction of French-Canadian Jean-Marc Vallée, who says he practically edits in advance.
“I design a shot with the crew, with the DP (director of photography) and the actors, where I’m thinking ‘editing.’ I’m not necessarily telling them on the day that this will be how it’ll be cut, but I sometimes do it ... These two hats help, and it’s part of my process and language that I developed through the years,” he explains.
“I wouldn’t think of doing it differently. It’s such a way of doing it now with me and the collaborators, that this is how we do it, and we develop this thing, where it’s available light, it’s handheld. We ask the crew to get out most of the time to use this space ... and we don’t cut between shots. We just move because it’s easy.”