The Amy Adams method
LOS ANGELES — Amy Adams stars this month in the HBO miniseries “Sharp Objects,” her first television role since she began starring in features more than a decade ago. The eight-episode arc, based on the controlled burn of a novel by Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”), marks a departure of another sort, too — Adams’ 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.
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 the straight-to-DVD knockoff “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 small-town expectant mother in “Junebug.” This was what she refers to as the “Innocents” phase, the one seared into collective memory, in which she became one of the most famous and wellliked actresses in America.
As Giselle in the subsequent “Enchanted” (2007), she breathed exuberant life into not only a high-concept revision of Disney princess dogma but an entire 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 in scathing battle, 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 Adams has spent this decade evolving further still. 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.
To become Camille in “Sharp Objects,” she began, as she always does, by overpreparing — mapping the character’s existential and emotional biography until she believes in her bones that they might plausibly walk the Earth.
The physical transformation was equally demanding, requiring her to stand nearly naked for three to four hours of prosthetics — each morning of a 90-day shoot — in order to create Camille’s topography of cutting scars.
Flynn said that, between “action” and “cut,” Adams “completely immersed herself physically, bodily, mentally into Camille.” JeanMarc Vallée, who directed all eight episodes of the series, said: “I noticed her voice dropped a few notes and her way of walking changed. Suddenly, it was more sloppy, like ‘I don’t give a [expletive].’”
Adam McKay, director of a coming film about the life of Vice President Dick Cheney, tentatively titled “Cheney,” said Adams and Christian Bale — a reputed method actor and her previous acting partner in “The Fighter” and “American Hustle”— showed similar devotion to their characters.
McKay said Adams’ fluid portrayal of the second lady, Lynne Cheney, which in the film covers five decades, resulted in a kind of uncanny hybrid that he and the rest of the crew took to calling “Amy Cheney.”
“She’s talking in that voice and emotionally leaning in that direction,” he said. “But you can still call her Amy and joke around and talk about other things.”
Like Camille, Adams’ character in “The Woman in the Window,” a Hitchcockian psychological thriller that debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list this year, 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 of the pattern, reverting to her baseline of reflexive self-effacement.
After surviving her “Innocents” phase — the earnestness, the piety, those doe eyes — is there a part of her that’s running in the opposite direction, searching down dark alleys to see what she might find?
She paused to think, toying compulsively with a beaded bracelet on her left wrist.
It’s not that she regrets any of her previous roles, but she is hungry for a different kind of 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.”