‘I’m always interested in trying to defy expectations’
Amy Adams, firmly in what she calls her ‘moody and introspective’ era, talks to Reggie Ugwu about Sharp Objects, in which she stars as a self-harming journalist who returns to her home town to report on a series of murders
Amy Adams reaches into her bum bag and fishes out some sunscreen. “I’m such a mumnerd,” she apologises, as if sensing the pretence of Hollywood Glamour melt with each dab to her flushed, freckled cheeks. It is a late morning in June and the sun is high; there is nothing to apologise for. But she is congenitally polite and, as she stares up at the storied Art Deco observatory in LA’S Griffith Park, on an 1,100-foot summit of Mount Hollywood, maybe a tiny bit self-conscious.
The hike had been her idea. A brisk climb punctuated by postcard views of Los Angeles landmarks: the Hollywood sign, the Santa Monica Mountains, the gauzy downtown skyline. Growing up in Colorado as one of seven children, hiking had been a family ritual – her parents’ way of getting her and her siblings to burn off energy without busting through the walls or the budget.
But because of an unlikely chain of recent events that, she explains, began with a runin with her childhood ballet teacher and ended with an overeager return to the barre, she has suffered an “old lady injury.” Which means that she hasn’t exercised in a while. Which means that, even a few dozen yards into a hike with someone whom she just met, she’s already felt herself running short of breath.
Between the panting and the bum bag, Adams, a five-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 says, zipping away the sunscreen. She is wearing dark, printed leggings, a black gift-shop baseball cap with her signature strawberry tresses pulled through it and a black T-shirt that reads, in big cutesy letters, “Better in real life.” “But whenever people meet me they’re always like, ‘Really? That’s who you are?’”
She stops for a moment, then deadpans the answer that she always thinks but never says: “Yes. It is.”
She’ll star tonight 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 harddrinking, self-cutting journalist who returns to her provincial home town to cover a series of mysterious murders, is among the most desolate and disquieting of her career.
“It was a whole other level,” she says, comparing the part with other damaged characters she’s played in the past. 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 says. “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 nearmisses from the raunchy, postscream 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 calls 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 is what she refers to as the Innocents phase, the one seared into collective memory, 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 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 riven with unresolved family trauma, suggesting what the actress identifies 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 says of what she saw in the role.
On the trail in Griffith Park, snaking toward the observatory, she describes a series of setbacks from her pre-junebug days – cancelled television series (she co-starred in the evanescent 2004 Rob Lowe vehicle, Dr Vegas), big breaks that snapped shut again – and an attendant “negative self-dialogue” that
“I have this internal voice that is just not a cheerleader for myself”