“I didn’t audition, I hounded!”: the role Amy Adams refused to give up on
By now, with over 30 years and multiple acclaimed roles, Amy Adams is one of the most well-established actors of her generation and a household name to boot.
It’s safe to say she can probably get any role she puts her mind to now, without even auditioning, but once upon a time, it wasn’t so easy.
Starting out in dinner theatre and moving on to small TV roles (you might have spotted her in Buffy The Vampire Slayer or The Office), Adams’ breakthrough didn’t come until 2005 at the age of 31 with Junebug. Despite it being an independent film and her being a relative unknown, it garnered her an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’. Her next few roles were a mixed bag of small rom-coms until Disney’s Enchanted.
Considering all of this, she very easily could have been doomed to rom-com territory, but she wasn’t about to let that happen when she came across the script for John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. The tense film adaptation of his Tony and Pulitzer-winning Broadway play of the same name stars Meryl Streep as strict sister Alonysios, who accuses Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Father Brendan Flynn of suspicious activity with a pupil.
When Adams’ friend and previous co-star Emily Blunt passed along the script for the naive yet faithful Sister James to her, she knew she had to have the part no matter what. “I didn’t audition, I hounded!” Adams explained. Shanley and producer Scott Rudin had already approached Natalie Portman for the part, so the former was told to let it go, but she wasn’t one to give up that easily.
She went so far as to fly to New York, telling Shanley she was ‘just in the neighbourhood’ and they should meet for a coffee, regardless of the part. In the end, he agreed, and they didn’t directly discuss the part during their meeting. “I’m a tenacious person,” Adams admitted, “but I’m not usually that sort of dog-with-a-bone. But I just loved Doubt. I loved the delicacy of it”.
And, luckily for her, her sheer charm and determination for the part won Shanley over. Both he and Streep spoke about Adams’ openness, radiance and charm, and how, despite her lack of experience in the industry, she was every part the professional. Anyone who has seen the movie will agree that there’s something about her unassuming yet magnetic presence that works particularly well for Sister James, even among the giants that are Hoffman and Streep.
This is seemingly what has worked for Adams in her career. There is something about the parts she picks, whether it be Arrival, Julie & Julia (also with Streep) or American Hustle, that work so well with her natural talents. She somehow manages to bring a presence and also disappear into the part, shining even when playing against type in David O Russell’s The Fighter.
Thankfully, she’s as tenacious as she is, because if she had not fought for the role of Sister James in Doubt, she might have ended up being typecast for the rest of her career, but then, she’s also a humble, personable actor who knows the roles she can take on, and it is always a delight to see what form that takes in the future.
