“I love Ireland!” Amy Adams nearly yells at me.
You might reasonably argue that they all say that. But Adams, an actor everyone likes, has genuinely put the hours in on the old sod. Back in 2010 she was about Wicklow and the west for the archetypal Oirish romcom Leap Year. (This was before reviewers here became a little too obsessed with taking humorous offence at begorrahcoms.) A little over a decade later she was back in Wicklow – Enniskerry to be precise – for the sequel to the faux-fantasy Enchanted.
“I spent three or four months there doing Disenchanted. It was wonderful,” she says. “They turned the town into Andalasia. They fairytaled the town for the summer. It was really something.”
There is a misleading staple image of Adams – not a natural redhead, fact fans – as a perky star of offbeat comedy: the Adams of Enchanted and Junebug. But her six (count them) Oscar nominations could scarcely be for more diverse material: sparky in Junebug, racked in Doubt, divided in The Fighter, sinister in The Master, glam in American Hustle, Lynne Cheney in Vice. After finishing Disenchanted she signed up to play a woman who, annihilated by the pressures of childrearing, feels herself becoming a dog (an actual dog, mind) in Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s searing novel Nightbitch.
Heller and she are chewing over this extraordinary project with me at London Film Festival. The film has already puzzled observers. It is not nearly so violently offbeat as Yoder’s book. But it has a lot more grit than a misleadingly zany trailer that emerged shortly before its premiere at Toronto International Film Festival. Scoot McNairy is convincingly useless as a husband who can’t grasp how hard it is to give up an outer life for the demands of stay-at-home motherhood. Every other parent seems perfect. Soon Adams’s ill temper mutates into something more sinister and more magically realist.
[ Amy Adams: ‘Don’t follow your fears’Opens in new window ]
The chilling key line comes when McNairy asks what happened to his hitherto easygoing wife. “She died in childbirth!” Adams, whose character is known simply as Mother, snaps back. Both Heller, the gifted director of Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and Adams are themselves parents. Can I tentatively ask if that line rang any bells with either of them? That almost seems a rude question.
“I mean, it’s a little bit dramatic,” Adams says with a forgiving smile. “I feel like maybe that person died in childbirth – the person I was before. But, for me, I feel like a new person was born in me when I gave birth to my daughter. So it really gave me so much more than it took away. And I think that’s where Mother will get to. She’s working constantly in that reality.”
“I think we have to go through a phase of a sort of mourning, the loss of the person we once were,” says Heller. “I don’t know if I was so prepared for that when I became a mother – that there would be so much that I had to let go of. I had to take the time to be sad about that, too, to mourn this version I had of who I was going to be, of who I was in the world. That it was never going to be quite the same again.”
Adams had her daughter with her partner, the actor and painter Darren Le Gallo, in 2010, five years before they married. She has never talked much about her private life, but she maintains that they have as normal an existence as anyone in her position can arrange.
[ Disenchanted feels muddled and half-cocked but Enniskerry looks like Disney WorldOpens in new window ]
By appearing in Nightbitch she has, however, inadvertently opened up inquiries about her attitude to motherhood – and fatherhood for that matter. The dad in Nightbitch is no sort of monster. But he exemplifies a common inability among dads to position themselves within their partners’ harried psyches. Is empathy even possible from a father? Is it too pessimistic to think not?
“Oh my goodness. I think it’s possible for them to have empathy,” Adams says with a nervous laugh. “But I think it’s such a unique experience. There are a lot of things I’m seeing now about them putting these simulators on men.”
Heller and I make aghast noises.
“Yeah, to simulate menstrual cramps and labour,” Adams continues. “It is really funny. But there is so much that we, as women, normalise in relation to discomfort and pain and sacrifice and sleeplessness. That becomes so normalised. And I don’t know that that’s normalised for men in the same way.”
Heller grins as she mentions the recent Demi Moore film The Substance. Coralie Fargeat’s extraordinary horror, partly a satire of the beauty industry, ends with Moore’s body tearing itself apart into knots of bloody tissue and tattered organ.
“Everybody’s talking about how The Substance could be a good double bill with Nightbitch,” she says. “That is exploring women’s bodies and the sacrifices that women go through for beauty standards. I think there’s so much pressure on women. We obviously know there’s so much pressure on how you need to look and how you need to act – whether you’re a mother or not a mother.”
That sounds about right. And, though those pressures have always been there, they have become more savage in the digital age. Everyone has a camera at all times. Everyone is a paparazzo. No wonder websites groan with images of famous women not living up to some nonentity’s standards of beauty.
“There is this ever-raising bar of expectation,” Adams says. “As much as you get right, there is always something else to criticise. There’s something else to attack. There’s something else to find fault in.”
Adams was born in Italy when her father was serving in the US military. Her life was typical for an “army brat”, a peripatetic shift from one base to another until they finally settled in Castle Rock, Colorado. Her dad became a modestly successful professional singer; Adams remembers sitting proudly in the corner while he performed. Meanwhile, her mother turned into a semi-professional bodybuilder. Both parents were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but left when Adams was still a child. It sounds like a classically colourful American upbringing and just the sort of childhood that might produce an actor.
The experience of Nightbitch must surely have made her think a little about the pressures placed on her own mother. Maybe the 1970s and 1980s were even less forgiving than now.
“My mother’s experience and my experience as a mother are so different, in that she started her journey in motherhood when she was 19,” Adams says. “She was just sort of starting in the world. And I was 35. So I had a totally different experience with motherhood than she did. She had seven children. So I can’t imagine.”
“That’s wild,” Heller says.
“We had such a different experience. I’ve always felt, I don’t even know how you did that.”
Some actors come up through soap operas. Others take a route through drama school. A few, as teenagers, get propelled to premature stardom by talent scouts. Adams travelled through the quaint world of Minneapolis dinner theatre. I am surprised to learn that still went on in the 1990s. You get a chicken pot pie and a decent performance of Arsenic and Old Lace. “Look, I was just bad at everything else,” she told me in 2016. “I am a horrible waitress. I hadn’t pursued anything else. I had to see this through.”
She also told me that she knew how to live below her means. A childhood without much money helped instil the right attitude. It also trained her to jump at any opportunity, however modestly promising. When she was shooting Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can with Leonardo DiCaprio, she remembers him laughing that he’d seen her on telly the previous night in Cruel Intentions 2.
The Spielberg film must have seemed like a big break in 2002, but things went a tad quiet again before she landed Phil Morrison’s Junebug three years later. The film was not a huge hit, but it got great reviews and, against the odds, landed the virtual unknown an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. There she was up against Frances McDormand, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener and the eventual winner, Rachel Weisz. She has remained a regular at the Oscars and now tops many lists of those seen as most overdue a win.
Adams has never been afraid of taking a risk and seeming unlovable on screen. Just look at her turn as wife to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sinister cult leader in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, from 2012. Look at her performance in Nightbitch. She is happy to get scruffy and messy. She is happy to show the grime and grub of even relatively well-off motherhood.
“I love scruffy, messy. That’s basically how I like to describe it,” Adams says. “I think what’s wonderful is we are seeing more female producers, female-led production teams, female directors. We are really amplifying those voices. I think that the more we give opportunity for female film-makers to bring these stories to the forefront, the more we’re going to see an authentic and honest and truthful portrayal of the female experience. I know this year there’s a lot of them, and I’m happy to be a part of that. That’s why it was so important for us on Nightbitch to have Marielle, because the first time I talked to her I knew she totally got it.”
Heller is, indeed, an original director who shows no reluctance to swerve dramatically between genres. The Diary of a Teenage Girl, her debut, was a rough-hewn coming-of-age drama. Can You Ever Forgive Me?, a tale of deception from 1990s New York City, drew splendid turns from Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood had Tom Hanks introduce the rest of the world to the American TV legend “Mr” Fred Rogers. Now she helps Adams again show her versatility and fearlessness.
“I’m just always looking for something new, something to challenge me in a different way, and also something that reflects my evolving being in my own journey,” Adams says. “Different things speak to me at different times. It runs parallel to a personal experience in one way or another – something I am attached to at that time in my life. Whether it be generational trauma, which I’m always fascinated with, or societal views and motherhood.”
Heller cuts in.
“It shows your range and your ability to kind of cross ... I don’t know...”
“Change themselves into a b***h? You’ve seen me do that in five minutes.”
“Someone is going to pick up on that. That’s a great headline.”
As if we would.
Nightbitch is in cinemas from Friday, December 6th
