Amy was featured in American Way Magazine in August of this year. I have added some photos from the website to the gallery and you can read part of the interview below.

How Amy Adams went from being a small-town girl to being one of the most sought-after starlets of her generation.

Her friends call her by her full name, Amy Lou, and there’s no other name more fitting for her. True, such a down-home name doesn’t, at first, seem to befit the blazing red-haired screen siren we know as Amy Adams (though, in the spirit of full disclosure, her hair is naturally blonde). It sounds more suitable for someone like the wide-eyed Southern-sweetheart character Adams played in the 2005 indie film Junebug than for the actress who played her on the big screen and was then nominated for an Academy Award for her honest portrayal. But underneath the blockbuster beauty, the accolades, and the fame, Adams is still Amy Lou, the sweet-natured, small-town girl with strong morals from Castle Rock, Colorado.

Adams grew up the middle child in a family of seven children. She and her siblings were raised Mormon until she was 12, at which point her parents divorced and the family left the church. Her father was a military man who moved with his family from base to base until they settled, at least long enough for Adams to graduate from high school, in Colorado. Her mother was an amateur bodybuilder who worked at a gym. Adams herself worked at the Gap and even did a short stint at Hooters. It was hardly glamorous.

You can read the rest of the article here

That Amy Adams Touch

Amy Adams has a smile that plays big, taking over her face, then the room, then everyone in it. It’s as if the world is suddenly bathed in sunshine. That’s why it’s hard to imagine anyone else as the dipped-in-happiness princess of “Enchanted,” a cartoon character come to life, who sings and sews her way into Patrick Dempsey’s heart.

But as wonderful as that super-saturated optimism can be, and as much as Hollywood suits and moviegoers alike prefer her in those roles, she is even more interesting to watch as someone who’s been hurt, betrayed by life or circumstance or someone else. Those finely textured performances have a way of surprising you, so unexpected do they feel, so unlike the lightness of her comedy.

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Inspired by the Hasbro action figure, Paramount’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra took command of the weekend box office with a $56.2 million debut domestically, according to studio estimates Sunday. G.I. Joe also took in $44.3 million overseas for a worldwide total of $100.5 million.

Meryl Streep’s Julia Child tale Julie & Julia opened a solid No. 2 as an alternative for adult crowds with $20.1 million. While G.I. Joe was the first choice for young males, women 35 and older were the main audience for Julie & Julia.

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As for reviews of the film… the majority of them are favorable with Rotten Tomatoes listing it as 76% fresh.  Most critics are saying that Amy’s part of the movie, the Julie half, isn’t as strong as the Julia part.  To be clear though, most are not saying it’s Amy’s fault – it is Meryl after all and she just nails the part as she always does.  Hard to compete with that lol.

After scoring an Oscar nod for her co-starring role with Meryl Streep in Doubt, Amy Adams is back on the big screen with the Academy Award-winning legend. But this time, Adams doesn’t have a single scene with Streep.

In Julie and Julia, Adams takes on the real-life role of a woman who cooked (and blogged) her way through every recipe in Julia Child’s masterpiece, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Parade.com’s Jeanne Wolf found out why Amy’s most memorable moment took place off of the set—and how she almost gave up on her acting career.

Take two on her engagement.
“I got engaged the night before we wrapped Julie and Julia [to her boyfriend of six years, Darren La Gallo]. It was funny because I was actually running lines from the script in my head while we were taking this romantic carriage ride in Central Park. I felt really bad for Darren. I was like, ‘You should get a re-do because you were cheated.’ All I was thinking about was my last day at work.”

Why she loves him.
“Darren gives up a lot and gives me a lot. He comes to visit me on set. He draws me a bath when I get home. He’s an actor and also an artist and he sends me drawings. Just lots of sweet little things to keep us connected.”

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Amy Adams and Chris Messina are pretty cute individually, but put together, they’re practically magnetic. Even though they play the very flawed, very human Julie and Eric Powell in Julie & Julia, in person they’re really just movie-star attractive and charming.

Still, their depiction of a modern marriage in Julie & Julia feels honest and real, making them perfect counterparts to the other half of the story, about the fairytale marriage between Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci). Read below as they talk about creating real people out of their characters, dealing with the massive amount of food they had to eat on camera, and Chris Messina’s early brush with fame– and Meryl Streep.

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I’m a bit of a homebody at heart, and I like the idea of cooking dinners and keeping house. Well, not cleaning house, because I’m really bad at that, but keeping house

In “Julie & Julia,” Amy Adams plays a woman who is facing the prospect of turning 30 and not feeling too good about herself.

Based on a true story, Adams’ Julie Powell is a New York City government employee and failed novelist. Giving herself a goal, the real-life Powell decided to chop and cook her way through all 500-plus recipes in Julia Child’s seminal 1961 cookbook, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” in one year while blogging about her experiences.

The film, which opens Friday, tells both stories: Powell’s to complete her task and ultimately to be published; and Child’s to become a chef in France when such things were unthinkable for a woman.

The year before her 30th birthday, Adams wasn’t feeling very positive about her own career, either. At the time, nearly six years had gone by since the actress had moved to Los Angeles from Minneapolis, where she had been working in dinner theater.

She had gotten some roles — most notably in Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can” (2002) as a nurse whom Leonardo DiCaprio’s character falls for — but her career had never caught fire. In fact, she didn’t get another part for a year after “Catch Me.”

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I’m not necessarily looking to play the bad girl specifically. If there’s a great role that’s written and she happens to be a little nasty…

Since her breakthrough role as Princess Giselle in Disney’s Enchanted, Amy Adams has gotten notice playing nice women – from the troubled nun in Doubt to Amelia Earhart in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and a poor chorine in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.

As Julie Powell, the frustrated housewife who finds personal satisfaction – and an admiring public – when she blogs about cooking like Julia Child in Julie & Julia, Adams adds another notch to her “nice girl” belt.

Does she ever long to return to the evil vixenhood she embraced in Cruel Intentions 2?

“Well, right now these are the roles that are coming to me and I’m not necessarily looking to play the bad girl specifically. If there’s a great role that’s written and she happens to be a little nasty,” Adams said nodding.

“But I don’t want to do it just for the sake of doing it. For me, it’s just about creating human beings the way that I see them, as opposed to creating a caricature of a human being.”

At least in Julie & Julia Adams was free of the baggage usually associated with portraying a real-life character.

Unlike Meryl Streep’s Child, a performance that will be measured against often vivid memories of the eccentric and beloved TV chef and author, Powell remains virtually unknown even though her blog became a best-selling book and now a movie.

“I still have not met Julie Powell,” Adams said. “For me, creating a character that was living in the world of our film was really important. My interpretation was based on ‘meeting’ (Julie) through her book and her blogs and through Nora (Ephron, the writer-director) who spent an extensive amount of time with her.”

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I’ve found two blogs which contain various bits of the same interview with Amy, Meryl, and Nora which was held on July 27th.  I am posting them both here so be sure to continue reading – it’s long!

Version One

The Julie & Julia tornado touched down in Beverly Hills on July 27. The stars and writer-director were hours away from the film’s West Coast premiere, but Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Nora Ephron generously took the time to meet with six bloggers (3 food/3 film) for a roundtable discussion about the movie and their connection to food and cooking. Here are some of the highlights:

Q: What drew each of you to the story, to the film?

Meryl Streep: I read Nora’s script which was extremely beautiful and interesting and I thought probably not commercial whatsoever and I was very worried about her sanity and her financing and everything else, but they were willing to give us the money and I think it’s turned out really, really well!

I just really loved the story of these two women looking for their calling. I just thought it was extremely touching and also sort of elliptically written, not hammered on the head. It’s so hard to find beautifully, subtly written things.

Amy Adams: It was gentle.

Meryl Streep: There was a whole energy that was unique.

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Why did you go with Amy Adams to play Julie Powell?

Well, you know, Amy is so… I saw Sunshine Cleaning. Did you see it? She is so real. It’s just unbelievable… I have friends who saw her in the one where she was pregnant and got nominated… Junebug, and they all thought she was some pregnant Southern person that they had found while casting the movie. She’s so able to become all sorts of things, and one of the things she has no trouble becoming is somebody who’s smart, and I really needed that for this person.

It’s one of the things I loved [about] working with Meg Ryan, was that she was always some sort of writer and you always believed that Meg could do that, and that’s what I thought was true of Amy too. And I also thought Amy was a kind of perfect example of someone living in New York but not quite of New York, which is what Julie… you know, Julie had so much Texas, I thought, to her. So you know, it was sort of that. But basically I was lucky to get her. That’s how I look at it.

Read the rest of the interview with Nora and the real Julie Powell here.

A short, but fun interview from bonappetit.com – and what a cute illustration!

In her new movie, Julie & Julia, the actress takes to the kitchen as Julie Powell, a frustrated government employee whose life changes when she vows to cook and blog about all the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We caught up with the Oscar-nominated star to ask about her own culinary skills and why simplicity is the best ingredient of all.

Did reading Julie & Julia, the book on which the movie was based, influence you at all?
It did. The writer wasn’t a professional chef. I think cooking can be a bit intimidating if it’s something you don’t do all the time. The book gave me courage to try new things in my own life.

For the movie, you learned how to debone a duck. Did you learn anything else?
I learned how to poach an egg, which sounds easier than it is. How to cut a tomato and an onion properly was a big deal. I made lobster thermidor, hollandaise sauce, mayonnaise, trussed chicken. I also learned to make an omelet without using a spatula.

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