Hustle star Adams is no pushover
Sweet image changes with role as schemer
I never fought for or against playing a sexual or sensual woman ...
Amy Adams has a reputation as one of the most polite actresses in Hollywood. Many of her more memorable performances, in films such as Junebug, Julie & Julia and Enchanted, have been steeped in sweetness.
Until now. Her performance in David O. Russell’s new film, American Hustle — as Sydney, the hardened, schemingly seductive partner to Christian Bale’s con-man — turns her reputation on its head and has already earned her a Golden Globe nomination.
It’s a film so good that people will be quoting its lines for decades.
One U.S. critic asked: “How many youngsters will be jump- started into puberty by … Amy Adams in American Hustle?”
“Oh,” she says, shocked. “My, goodness.” And then she says, “I never fought for or against playing a sexual or sensual woman, it’s just there hadn’t been one offered to me that felt like it came from an authentic place and wasn’t there just to serve the male characters.”
The character, on the other hand, is, “doing it for her own reasons, to empower herself, that’s why I was drawn to her. So it’s funny for people to suddenly be like, ‘Hey, you’re hot.’ I never thought that would be the thing people found most interesting about my character — the cleavage!”
Adams will turn 40 next year and says: “I think every woman’s beautiful. Some people say, ‘Well, I’m just a sexual being.’ I think we all are! That’s kinda how we … y’know, keep everything moving. I think women can play sexy at any age. It’s about how you feel about yourself.”
There’s also a confrontational
AMY ADAMS
kiss that Jennifer Lawrence’s character plants on the lips of Adams. It was, Adams proudly admits, her own idea.
“I thought, what’s the ultimate chess move here? What would throw Sydney? What would she not know how to respond to?”
Adams believes that, owing to her clean-cut image, there is no way she would have been cast in a role like this 10 years ago.
At 23, she was living in her native Minnesota, doing dinner theatre and hoping to get cast in a television commercial so that she could, “maybe buy a car.” Her first film role was in the beauty pageant mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous.
“I was happy,” she says. “But very naive and not very brave.”
Those qualities were particularly in evidence in her breakout film, Junebug (2005). Adams was a revelation as an unworldly, painfully vulnerable young housewife whose baby is stillborn. The performance earned her the first of four Oscar nominations. Two years later she played a wide-eyed Disney princess in Enchanted. It’s the role that many people still seem to conflate with Adams herself; David O. Russell is not, however, among them.
“You are so not a Disney princess,” he told her when he cast her alongside Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter, the boxing biopic in which she plays a salty barmaid, tough enough to take on his terrifying clan of hard-faced, big-permed women. It yielded another Oscar nomination (her third, following a nod for Doubt, two years earlier).
Soon after, she earned a fourth as the wife of a cult leader, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, in last year’s The Master.
For the first 11 years of her life, Adams was raised a Mormon. “That whole thing about being polite and cheerful, these are qualities that are instilled in Mormon women,” she says. “I feel a real consequence when I hurt somebody. The horrible thing is, there are people that I would love to eviscerate and I just know I would get no joy out of it.”
She also thinks that she has, as she puts it, “a strange cloak of invisibility. I feel that I move through the world and through my career and I’m really proud of the work that I’ve done but … I’m not an explosive actress. It’s very low key, my life.”
She feels grateful, she says, that she can “go to the farmers’ market and pretty much be left alone. Except for a couple of crazy paparazzi. “I’m very boring, I do the same thing all the time. I hike, I exercise, I go to the grocery store and I work, a lot, and I take my kid to school. I’m always like, really, they’re still taking pictures? It’s just me in the grocery store again.”