Amy Adams

BY: Howard Karren

“I love being a supporting actress,” says Amy Adams, the all-American redhead who has been nominated for an Oscar in five supporting roles: in Junebug (2005), playing a naive, pregnant country girl and compulsive chatterbox; in Doubt (2008), as a submissive nun working under Meryl Streep’s powerhouse mother superior; in The Fighter (2010), playing Mickey Rourke’s ego-boosting girlfriend; in The Master (2012), as a severe follower of cult leader Philip Seymour Hoffman; and in American Hustle (2013), as the con-game partner (with a British accent) of Christian Bale. “In my experience, the lead role has the burden of plot,” Adams told an audience at the Telluride Film Festival this year. “I’m not looking at the size of the role. I’m looking at, Will I get a chance to grow?”

And grow she has. Many of us first saw her as Leonardo DiCaprio’s giggling fiancée in Catch Me if You Can (2002), but Adams, 42, is now more than capable of carrying a film on her own. She’s certainly no stranger to lead roles: she charmed the whole of New York in Enchanted, singing and dancing as a Disney princess; she blogged daily for a year about preparing Julia Child recipes in Julie & Julia; and in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, she played the kitsch artist Margaret Keane, and nabbed a Golden Globe. And now, this fall, Adams will be starring in two movies generating lots of buzz. Paramount is releasing Arrival on November 11, an alien-close-encounters drama in which she plays a linguist with the unique ability to communicate with other-worldly beings (watch the trailer, above). A week later, on November 18, Focus is releasing Nocturnal Animals, a psychological thriller directed by Tom Ford, in which Jake Gyllenhaal, as Adams’s ex-husband, writes a book that barely veils a threat to kill her. These are both films that PROVOKR readers will not want to miss.