Amy Adams’ evolution away from ‘innocent’ roles
Five-time Oscar nominee’s roles have expanded from sunny to complex, layered
For a time, Amy Adams, a former chorus girl from Colorado, was known for her princesses and country girls: sweet and sunny characters that helped make Adams a star.
“I call them the innocents; like Picasso, my ‘innocent period,’ ” Adams says, chuckling. “But the naiveté or anything that I brought to a role, I didn’t feel trapped by it. I thought each of them saw the world in a different way. I was perplexed that people saw me in that way, but I understood it. I didn’t know when or how that would change, but I knew it needed to in order for me to evolve as an actress.”
That evolution has been going on for some time, from the forceful restraint of her performances in Doubt and The Master to more unbridled outings in a pair of David O. Russell films, The Fighter and American Hustle.
At 42, she is already a five-time Oscar nominee. But this fall, in a pair of layered performances, Adams’ expanding range and growing complexity has never been more on view.
In Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, she stars as a linguist tasked by the government with communicating with newly landed aliens whose orb-like ships are mysteriously hovering off the ground. The movie, which opened Friday, is thick with a Close Encounters of the Third Kind atmosphere and resonant — through Adams’ performance — with deeper emotions than most sci-fi films.
Adams also stars in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (out Nov. 18), as a Manhattan gallerist trapped in an unhappy marriage. When a novel written by her first husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrives, she’s teleported into a fictional world. The book’s story, a bloody thriller, is heavy with personal subtext.
“Both of these characters come to a crossroads and I feel like I’m at a bit of a crossroads,” Adams reflected in an interview in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where both films played.
“It’s being a mom and entering my 40s, and looking at things in a differ- ent way, a way that has been really awesome,” Adams said of her shift.
But those changes, she says, are mostly about finding a balance between her career and her family life. She and husband Darren Le Gallo have a 6-year-old daughter. Though spelling out the connection would give too much away, motherhood was an especially powerful influence on Arrival.
Adams agreed to do the film within 24 hours of being sent the script.
Adams’ range as an actress is a sneaky kind. There are no tales of tortured transformations. She simply keeps showing up in role after role, fully inhabiting a character with warmth and smarts while, to varying degrees, remaining herself.
Villeneuve, the Quebec director of Sicario and Prisoners, says he needed a strong actress who could emote.
“I knew that the movie would be on her shoulders,” says Villeneuve. “I wanted someone who you could read what was she was going through without words. The movie is Amy Adams, to me.”
Ford, the fashion designer whose previous film, A Single Man, was Oscar-nominated, pursued Adams for some of the same qualities.
“It’s in her eyes. She has a soul and you can look right into her eyes and see it. You cannot not like Amy Adams,” says Ford. “There was not a bad take of that woman. Her brain is always moving and everything she’s thinking is always on her face.”
Adams hasn’t entirely left “the innocents” behind. She will reprise her Enchantedrole in a sequel for Disney. And she has reliably been the most lively, intelligent thing in the DC Comics films as Lois Lane.
“I’d love to do a whole Lois thing, but I don’t think that’s where they’re going,” she says, with sarcastic understatement. “I can safely say that Justice League is not a Lois Lane stand-alone.”