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The Amy Adams

Approach
“You have to be OK with people
not liking you or liking your art.”
BY JENNA MAROTTA | LAST UPDATED: FEBRUARY
8, 2021

Photo Source: Luke Fontana

Inside a stark Hollywood photo studio,

Amy Adams’ detailed phrasing while
discussing her acting process
conjures finger-painted fridge notes,
candles with lost wicks, and a garage-
strung tennis ball patting a
windshield. “I like lived-in characters,”
she says. “I want a character to feel
like that’s who she’s been her whole
life. I don’t want it to feel like a
performance,” adding, “I want it to
feel like someone you know.”

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The women she brings to the screen

are so convincing, it’s easy to imagine
encountering them at crosswalks
after the end credits living the new
life you’ve dreamt up for them: Ashley
Johnsten (“Junebug”) rode her first
plane and had another baby; Sister
James (“Doubt”) left the church to
counsel sexual abuse victims; Julie
Powell (“Julie & Julia”), worn down by
the competitiveness of foodie
Instagram accounts, returned to
rustic cookery.

Although Oscars have eluded Adams

five times, she’s in the awards
conversation again for Adam McKay’s
Dick Cheney biopic “Vice” and her
recent work on “Sharp Objects,”
which has already made her a front-
runner in 2019’s Emmy race (not to
mention a lock for the upcoming SAG
Awards).

Adapted from Gillian Flynn’s novel, the

eight-part HBO miniseries, which
debuted in July, enlists Adams as
Camille Preaker, a St. Louis crime
reporter doubly imprisoned by words.
We pick up years after Camille has
extracted herself from the Missouri
Bootheel and her mother Adora’s
(Patricia Clarkson) manicured claws,
only to be sent back to investigate the
murder of a local girl. Forced to again
write herself out of small-town
America, she manages her anxiety by
quietly and constantly pouring vodka
into her water bottles while resisting
the urge to etch another 350 cries for
help into her skin—from “INJURY” to
“WRONG” to “VANISH.” Her addiction
to self-harm—revealed in parsed-out
flashbacks—mandates a dress code
of long-sleeved forced modesty;
almost every inch of her skin remains
covered, despite the sweltering
Missouri heat.

During the 91-day shoot, daily scar

application took one to three hours.
“Because they’re head to toe, I had to
stand up pretty much in my
underwear,” says Adams. “Being
confronted with the sight of me every
day as [my skin] would transform and
standing there feeling really
vulnerable, it really fed the character.”

Long before arriving on set for

director Jean-Marc Vallée (“Big Little
Lies”), Adams (also an executive
producer on the project) started her
preparation by “mining” details from
Flynn’s text and ordering numerous
books on self-harm. She spent “hours
and hours and hours” with her acting
coach, Warner Loughlin, whom she
refers to as her “acting therapist,”
since “essentially we go in and break
down the characters...discussing
[their] past[s] and moments and
motivations.”

Vallée was against the use of

voiceover, “so it was really important
to me to be able to communicate her
inner monologue just through acting,”
Adams says. “There’s a sadness and an
intensity about her, but she’s also very
raw and very vulnerable, and also very
compassionate, like strangely
compassionate.”

Her character’s compassion comes

through best in her relationship with
her charming but manipulative
younger half sister Amma (Eliza
Scanlen), and Adams decided she
wanted to help cast the role. (She also
had a say in who played Detective
Richard Willis, the love interest she
chases to question each suspect and
witness; the part went to her
onscreen “Julie & Julia” husband Chris
Messina.)

For Amma, Australian teenager

Scanlen “just was undeniable.” In the
audition room, Adams recalls, “She
not only kept up, but she got ahead,”
meaning “with every slippery trick I
was trying to use to see if she could
[handle them,] engaging, disengaging,
saying a line really quietly...just seeing
how she’ll react to things,” Scanlen
rose to the challenge. When Vallée
encouraged Scanlen to show
affection, the young actor crawled
onto Adams’ lap and stole a kiss.
Theirs is an at first cautious chemistry
that blossoms as the season and their
relationship progresses, and Scanlen’s
scenes with Adams are some of the
show’s best.

Sharp Objects (2018) T…

Developing a rapport with her co-

stars was necessary for Adams’
preparation, but getting ready for
“Sharp Objects” also meant
constructing Camille’s sense
memories. “You kind of tell yourself
the stories of what happened to the
character,” she says, explaining how
she assembles from scratch a very
specific set of recollections for the
women she plays. For example, filming
“Arrival” required many instances
where her character, Louise Banks,
pined for the little girl she’d lost. “To
think about my daughter, a trigger
would be the smell of the shampoo in
her hair,” says Adams. Her process
involves putting these manufactured
memories “into my body as reality,”
ergo “just a real big mind bend.”
Although these thoughts are assigned
to characters, “they feel really real,
because you go into detail.”

Channeling Camille necessitated

three months of Adams exploring the
fictional journalist’s anger and
sadness. “That need to relieve
yourself of pain, to make your pain
visible, was something I identified
with,” she says. “I get to work out my
crap by playing these characters and
exposing myself in a way that feels
relatively safe,” reasoning that the
strength her family provides (plus the
stress relief of yoga and hiking) is why
she knows she can “come back” from
emotionally taxing shoots.

The one step Adams didn’t take while

developing the character was seeking
out actual survivors of self-injury.
“That felt so personal, and I never
want to feel like I’m exploiting
someone else’s pain,” she says.

However, Adams did look to sit down

with Lynne Cheney, whom she
portrays in “Vice”—McKay’s much-
awaited follow-up to his Academy
Award–winning “The Big Short”—but
for the sake of creative license, the
filmmakers did not pursue the family’s
input. A biopic of George W. Bush’s
running mate, “Vice” (out Dec. 25)
brings together the talents of
Christian Bale (Dick Cheney), Sam
Rockwell (Bush), Steve Carell (Donald
Rumsfeld), Tyler Perry (Colin Powell),
and many others.

“A lot of times, you’ll walk away from

the movie and you’ll be thinking about
a specific part or a specific scene,
and I was left with the sum of the
parts just blowing me away,” she says
of the film, whose producers include
Brad Pitt and Will Ferrell (who played
Adams’ paramour in another McKay
entry, “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of
Ricky Bobby”).

VICE | O;cial Trailer

Both she and now three-time co-star

Bale (“The Fighter,” “American Hustle”)
“approached our characters with a lot
of respect and compassion, and then
it’s our job as actors not to judge the
characters we play,” Adams says. “So
it’s interesting now on the other side
of it, because I know it’s going to
[inspire] very interesting
conversations, [and] I actually am still
in defense of my character.”

Upon accepting the role of second

lady, Adams laughs that she merely
“knew who [Lynne Cheney] was, and I
knew that Eminem mentions her in
one of his songs, so I knew her point
of view.”

She continues, “I really came to like

and respect her as a woman. She’s
very self-motivated, she pursued her
education, she has a Ph.D; she didn’t
just sit by, she had jobs of her own.
She’s very outspoken—whether I
agree with what she says all the time
or not, she’s not afraid to use her
voice for what she believes in. I could
probably do a little more of that.”

Still quite self-aware, Adams says that

she is beginning to worry less about
how others perceive her and her
choices. Back in the auditioning phase
of her career, she says, “I just
constantly did not present myself well
or wore the wrong thing, or I was very
nervous and my energy was
somewhat socially awkward.”
Meanwhile, on sets, she “didn’t want
to seem like the weird actor acting
like the character.”

Eventually, she accepted that “I’m

weird, and I’m going to be walking
around, saying lines, talking to myself,
and whatever the quirk is that my
character has. I’m going to be doing
that, and you all will think I’m nuts—
and I might be.”

It took time to get to this point, she

admits. “[In the past,] I got caught up
in thinking about things that weren’t
that important, like being successful
or getting the right job or having the
right anything. No, it wasn’t that [I was
turning down roles], it was just that I
wasn’t kind to myself about my
failures, and so one failure would feed
into another failure and another
because I couldn’t get ahead of it,”
she remembers. “I was auditioning,
but I was too nervous because I felt
too much riding on it.

“Now, it’s easy to look back and say

that, but at the time, I was ready to
pack it up.... I was doing a television
show, and I had been let go from the
television show, and that’s when I was
like, Clearly this industry and I are not
—at least this part of it, film and
television—aren’t gelling.” She
considered heading to New York or
exploring teaching in order to find
happiness in the pursuit rather than
the result. Then she landed “Junebug,”
a role she says came as a result of
“letting go.”

With practice, she’s learned to

balance the thick skin of an artist with
the vulnerability required for creative
flow. “Care!” she advises. “Everyone’s
like, ‘Oh, I act like I don’t care.’ That’s
my least favorite quality in people. I
care way too much,” she says,
laughing. “You put all of it into the
work, into the preparation.”

Photographed by Luke Fontana on November 2 in Los

Angeles; Hair by Laini Reeves, makeup by Pati Dubroff, styled

by Petra Flannery

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