AMY ADAMS - 'I Am Not Going to Judge Myself Anymore'

THE STAR OPENS UP ABOUT TURNING 50, RAISING A TEENAGER AND GETTING REAL ABOUT THE PRESSURES OF MOTHERHOOD IN HER WILD NEW MOVIE NIGHTBITCH

- ANDREA MANDELL

Amy Adams knows a sign of success. “I fell asleep in my makeup,” says the actress, sitting in her brightly lit kitchen the day after the L.A. premiere of her film Nightbitch. “I always know if I wake up and I’ve got a false eyelash stuck somewhere on my face, I’ve had a good night.”

As sunny as the light streaming in this afternoon, Adams is matter-of-fact when she delves into the darker shadows of her early years of motherhood, a topic she faces head-on in her new horror-comedy. Ask her when she started to feel like herself again after giving birth to her daughter Aviana, now 14, and she doesn’t skip a beat. “Last year?” chuckles Adams, who is married to artist Darren Le Gallo.

She’s joking, but that often destabilizing period is the inspiration for Nightbitch, in which her character, simply named Mother, is battling an imploded sense of self after welcoming her son. Unmoored and succumbing to animalistic instincts driven by the isolation of childcare—and an absent husband (Scoot McNairy) who blithely imparts to his wife that “happiness is a choice”—Mother seemingly starts morphing into an actual dog.

“I was here for it,” says Adams, 50, of letting loose in those feral onscreen moments, her pup Mochi (one of three in the house) slumbering next to her as she talks. After making her film debut in Drop Dead Gorgeous 25 years ago, the Colorado native has built one of the most respected careers in Hollywood, earning six Oscar nominations in a career that has spanned playing a suspicious nun in 2008’s Doubt opposite Meryl Streep to a linguist interacting with alien life in 2016’s The Arrival. In Nightbitch she stretches the imagination further, howling at the night moon and sprouting a tail. “It was fun to be in this woman’s shoes, because in these moments...pardon my language, but she’s gotten to a point where she has zero f---s to give,” she says. “So she’s just free from other people’s opinions about her.”