The actors on their work and each other’s on Variety’s Actor on Actor series.
Few stars are more willing to take risks than Amy Adams. Her turn as Second Lady Lynne Cheney in Vice is only the latest in a series of on-screen transformations, following her startling work in the HBO limited series Sharp Objects. Adams’ roles — from a heartbroken linguist in Arrival to a social climber in American Hustle to Lois Lane in the DC Universe — share little but Adams’ fierce tenacity and perpetual intelligence.
Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman’s characters seem at times to share nothing at all. Her 2018 has been as much of a tightrope walk as Adams’, with two juicy but divergent roles — as an achingly conflicted mother of a son in Boy Erased and as a hardened cop in Destroyer. On top of it all, she plays an undersea monarch in Aquaman, a role whose special-effects surroundings promise not to diminish Kidman’s star power.
Nicole Kidman: First of all, we have to acknowledge that we’ve both worked with Jean-Marc Vallée on limited series.
Amy Adams: You had him first. When I started working with him, you guys were releasing Big Little Lies, and I read about the intensity of the work. What was that like for you?
Kidman: It was incredibly intense, but it was also very freeing. It was almost slice-of-life, where he’s in there with the camera, because he operates the camera sometimes. I was really exposed, but that was good. What about you?
Adams: It was challenging, because it does create this voyeuristic energy. I had so much to do that the way he shot became an endurance challenge.
Kidman: You’re amazing in it. And I want to play sisters, so I’m putting that out there for anybody.
Adams: I always said that I wanted to be like Nicole Kidman, but I understood that I was like corduroy to her silk.
Kidman: No!
Adams: It’s so true. I’m so corduroy and I hate it, but it’s true. You have to know yourself.
Kidman: Well, I’m not silk. It’s like to be a little bit of lace, a little bit of leather. Can I be that?
Adams: Yeah, you can be that.
Kidman: I have a tough time learning lines. There’s different directors, and sometimes there’s improvising; sometimes you can move around the line and fill in, and other times it literally is to the rhythm, to every piece of punctuation. You take a breath when they want you to take a breath. Have you run that scope of directors?
Adams: Oh, absolutely. David O. Russell will throw lines to you in the middle of a scene, and you’re just saying them while in these intense situations.
Kidman: But I love that. People say, “What’s your process?” Well, it changes every film.
Adams: I agree, and I think that it’s so important to have that adaptability, because you never know the actor you’re going be working with, the director, what the day calls for. I always find that if I go into a scene with an idea of how this scene’s going to go, it never goes that way. And that’s when you get lost, when you’re trying to steer the scene. I used to try to steer scenes and I would get really panicky. There was this scene in The Master where I was supposed to wake [Joaquin Phoenix] up and he wasn’t waking up. I freaked out. I’d pour water on his head now; I’d be like, ‘You want to play that game, Joaquin, here you go.’ I didn’t roll with it, and I learned a lesson from that.”
This is an edited version of the story.
– Courtesy: Variety.com
