The actor Amy Adams knows is out of her league: “She sort of set the bar”
This week’s news dropped of yet another remake of Cape Fear, which is strange given there have already been two almost faultless examples of the psychotic thriller, one with Robert Mitchum and the other with Robert De Niro, but regardless, Apple TV is making another one, albeit stretched into a series and starring Javier Bardem and Amy Adams.
Those two leading cast members turn the announcement from less of a “why?” to more of an “Oh, OK then that might be decent”, because anyone who has seen No Country for Old Men knows what happens when Bardem plays an unhinged bad guy, and Adams has without doubt become one of the best actors around.
For almost 20 years now, she’s steadily been collecting awards nominations and making mostly excellent films, having graduated from Disney fare with the hit modern fairytale Enchanted back in 2007 to a gritty David O Russell film in 2010’s The Fighter, to starring opposite the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed 2012 film The Master.
Adams has neatly flitted in and out of genre movies, independent films and big-budget superhero efforts, playing Lois Lane in Zack Snyder’s Superman reboots and singing along surrounded by The Muppets in 2011. She also appeared in Spike Jonze’s prophetic AI film Her, and another O Russell film, American Hustle, which earned her an Oscar nod.
But although she was Oscar-nominated four times in seven years, perhaps her most impressive run came between 2016 and 2018, a two-year period that saw her put in some world-class performances in movies like Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals, the Christian Bale-starring White House drama Vice and the acclaimed TV series Sharp Objects. She won Golden Globe nominations for both of those roles, and we haven’t even mentioned Arrival yet.
One of the finest sci-fi movies of recent years, Denis Villeneuve’s jaw-dropping, heartbreaking alien movie in 2016 earned eight Oscar nominations, and Adams is in career-best mode as the linguist Louise Banks. And that same year, she was also presented with a career tribute award by the very woman who had inspired her almost 20 years earlier.
In 1998, as a young actor with dreams of turning pro, Adams was working in clothes shops when she saw Australian actor Cate Blanchett in the Shakespearean drama Elizabeth. A global hit, the film would go on to pick up eight Oscar nominations and Blanchett’s performance was especially acclaimed, as she won Best Actress together with a Golden Globe win for the same role.
Adams recalled seeing Blanchett in the film and told Parade: “She sort of set the bar, the way that she owned the screen.” Inspired, she would move to Hollywood the following year to pursue her acting dream.
Many years later, Blanchett and Adams would become close friends, particularly after the passing of Seymour Hoffman who they had both worked extensively.
Now after a few relatively quiet years Adams is about to star in some of the biggest-scale upcoming films on the Hollywood schedule, including 2027’s Star Wars: Starfighter alongside Ryan Gosling, Taika Waititi’s sci-fi Klara and the Sun with Jenna Ortega, and an upcoming TV miniseries telling the real life story of three women who took on the US retail giant Walmart, titled Kings of America.
