Amy Adams has not had a busy morning. We meet at midday at the Chateau Marmont, just off LA's Sunset Strip, and she is, she says, having "a laid-back mommy day". So far this has consisted of taking her daughter to school - it's January, so they've just started back - followed by a work-out, a shower, and now this. Afterwards, she'll go shopping at Target to pick up some washing powder ("People always say to me: 'You do your own shopping?'"), before picking up her daughter, who's five, from school, and then back to their Beverly Hills home with her husband for dinner. It is, she says, leaning back, "a real easy day".
The day, it becomes clear, is indicative of a direction. Not a left-turn into idleness exactly, but a re-evaluation of a post-thirties headlong rush that saw her, after a breakout role in 2005 indie hit Junebug at the relatively late age of 30, go from comedy sidekick (a stint in The Office, a bit-part in Talladega Nights) to leading roles as wide-eyed ingénues (Enchanted, The Muppets), to acting opposite Meryl Streep, twice (Doubt, Julie & Julia), to working for some of the world's most acclaimed directors, from Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master) to Spike Jonze (Her) to David O Russell (The Fighter, American Hustle). In an eight-year spell she was nominated for five Oscars and six Golden Globes, winning two of the latter.
For many, they'd just be getting started; revving up, say, for that elusive Oscar win. Sixth time lucky!
For Adams: not so much.
Part of the reason, she says, is her daughter, and the time she hasn't been able to spend with her. "I made my career a really big priority when I was younger and I don't regret the work that I did, but I really regret the time that I missed. So maybe I don't do four films a year now. Maybe I can take a step back. I still want to work, but it's got to make sense. For the next four or five years, the choices I make are going to have a lot to do with how it fits into life, you know? And it's gonna have to be OK."
For now, this simply means the 41-year-old taking on some more minor roles, or ones with more green screen (so they shoot close to home), or just generally roles that don't demand quite so much of her time.
This month, for instance, she's reprising her supporting role as Lois Lane in the second instalment of the rebooted Superman franchise, titled Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, which sees Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill battling it out for the thing all superheroes must strive for: a money-spinning sequel with yet more superheroes (a Justice League film, where they team up like the Avengers, is expected). Next up, Arrival (green screen: "I spent so much time talking to a screen! It's actually a very small film. It's about aliens who are trying to communicate with us. I'm the linguist they bring in") and then Tom Ford's follow-up to A Single Man, called Nocturnal Animals, which co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Armie Hammer and which she shot in three weeks.
She recently watched the new Star Wars, and is slightly obsessed ("I say, 'May the force be with you,' to my daughter before she goes to school and she's like, 'I'm not Rey, Mom!'"), so would certainly be interested in a bit-part. "Yup! We'd figure it out! I'll play a creature. I don't care. Put the dots on my face and I'll crawl around!" A Wookiee even? "I think more an Ewok, considering my stature." And she wouldn't rule out being a Bond girl either, but worries you can't be a woman of mystery as a redhead. "I mean, I'd love to be a Bond girl. But it would depend. I don't see myself like Eva Green, she's so gorgeous and mysterious. I don't see myself like that." And then, well, she'll see. Despite being one of the most lauded actors of the past decade, she worries this self-enforced semi-sabbatical might hurt her career. But, she adds, "It's gonna have to be worth the risk."
The first thing that strikes you upon meeting Adams isn't necessarily her porcelain skin (much noted), auburn hair (dyed darker than her natural strawberry blonde ever since she was in a TV show with another blonde, who was 5ft 10in and tanned, "And they said, 'We don't want two blondes, one of you has to change your hair colour.' I was like, 'Gee, I wonder who it's going to be?'") or her slightly upturned nose (cute as you'd imagine), but her speaking voice. Half conspiratorial aside, half teacher coaxing a particularly shy student, every sentence is delivered in the soft, earnest cadence of someone letting you into a secret - but don't tell anyone.
Talk to anyone about Adams and they will tell you something you might suspect, but feels like too much of a cliché to be true. She sings - all the time.
"Oh man, does she!" Batman v Superman director Zach Snyder says to me when I speak to him over the phone. "I mean, let me say that there are two Amys. One is this incredibly seriously dedicated actor, examining the emotional arcs of each scene, in tune with everything you're trying to achieve. And then there's the other Amy, who's always, 'Let's sing some show tunes!' Never go to karaoke with her."
On the Batman v Superman set, Adams says, she sang so much they eventually put up a banner. It read: "Days Since 'Let It Go' Was Sung". The counter was always at zero.
Her proudest achievement? Getting Joaquin Phoenix to take part in a duet. "Yes! He would do Annie! He said, 'I love that musical.' I was like, 'Are you teasing me?'"
Partly, you can put this down to her disposition (sunny), partly down to her nerves ("I often sing if I'm nervous or need to relax"), but partly, also, to her religious upbringing, as a Mormon.
"Even now when I go to family reunions with cousins, everyone gets up and sings a song," she says.
She hasn't remained in the faith ("I have coffee and alcohol, which is a no-no..."), yet it has remained in her: an earnest, straight-down-the-line quality that's easy to mimic but hard to fake.
For each role she takes on, she says, the first thing she does is consider the character's religious background.
Lois Lane, for instance, is someone who has lost a lot of faith, "but I wouldn't call her God-fearing". For Margaret Keane, the artist she played in Tim Burton's Big Eyes, it was huge, "because Margaret is a Jehovah's Witness, and towards the end that was something that gave her strength". And for the nun in Doubt, well... "Haha, yes, that one was kinda spelled out for me."
The follow-through of this earnestness, of course, can be naivety. But with Adams this just feels more like good faith.
For the role of vixen con artist Sydney Prosser in American Hustle, for instance - which saw her make the unlikely mid-career switch from ingénue to sex symbol - she was surprised that people found her sexy, despite sporting a range of dresses that could charitably be called fabric-light.
"It's funny. I never thought of her as sexy, because for me she was putting it on, do you know what I mean? But then I was like, wait a second, does everyone put it on? It's funny, because I thought of her as really damaged, like she was lying to everyone." She gives the word a proper airing, as if it's the worst thing one could imagine. "People said, 'You are so hot in that movie.' I thought, 'Oooh, people like hot liars!' As long as you're tanned and skinny you can do whatever you want. Awesome!"
Still, being somewhat unaware had its own issues - not least with those dresses.
"No, I really wasn't aware of them! Which became a problem. Jennifer Lawrence was literally like, 'Amy, really, can you sit up straight? Because I'm so tired of your boobs. I can't keep staring at the floor not to see them.' Haha. She was awesome by the way. But yeah, she would be like, 'There they are again!'"
It's notable that the real speed bump in her career didn't come down to a lack of talent, but a problem with how she saw herself. In 2002, she'd just starred as Leonardo DiCaprio's callow bride-to-be in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can. Everyone agrees it should have been her breakout hit - even Spielberg called it "the part that should have launched her career" - but then, for years, almost nothing: voice-over work (King Of The Hill) or forgettable TV shows (Dr Vegas: it was set in Vegas; there was a doctor).
It wasn't that she wasn't getting the opportunities. "I read for a lot of leads. And I read for a lot of great supporting parts." Just that she kept messing them up. Why?
"I was still way too insecure. I just don't think I was confident enough. I wasn't strong enough. I didn't have a strong woman femininity, you know? Luckily Junebug came along and I was in a completely different place."
It probably won't come as too much of a shock that she was playing a wide-eyed southern belle who was deeply religious. She was nominated for her first Oscar.
But, of course, for Adams, her religious background goes much deeper than how she sees her roles. As she'll later say to me, the main thing she retains from her Mormon upbringing is this: "I still believe in treating people in a certain way."
And that's how we get onto the subject of David O Russell.
Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy, when her father - an army veteran - was based there. Her childhood was mostly spent zig-zagging the States, however; the typical life of an army brat, barely calling one place home before moving in search of another. Her father eventually quit the forces, deciding one day to do what he loved (singing, naturally) and performed in pizza restaurants as his seven children (Adams is the fourth, with four brothers and two sisters) watched from the bar. "I used to drink Shirley Temples. I felt very sophisticated."
Was her father frustrated? "I don't know. He enjoyed performing. I've asked him about it, but I think he just recognises that that industry is difficult and would have been hard to really pursue with a family."
They never had much money, but amused themselves by performing skits written by their father. One was called "Booky Booky Betty And Fancy Butt Freddie" (it was about a nerd turning into a cool kid. It required Adams to sing a lot. She was five and a half).
She worked, briefly, and incongruously given her nature, as a Hooters waitress - a pitcher-and-sports bar chain where the waitresses are required to essentially wear gym outfits - when she turned 18. "The weird part is I must have looked about 13. I was playing 16 when I moved out here [to LA] at 24. So I must have looked really young. So that's even creepier to think back about." One guy tried to grab her bum before getting thrown out ("You weren't allowed to touch. They were good about that").
Another person "offered me 250 bucks for my shirt. You know, if I took if off and gave it to him. I said he should pick another girl for a number of reasons. One is, I'm not that kind of girl. The other is that it's all padded. I think it was when I'd just discovered the Wonderbra."
Her parents divorced when she was eleven, and all seven siblings would visit the gym where her mother worked right after the divorce and generally cause chaos. ("We must have been nightmares. We didn't listen to authority. We were like Lord Of The Flies.") Her mother got heavily into personal training, eventually becoming a body-builder ("I mean, it was right after my parents divorced... but she's always been really active. She's ripped. For a woman of 65, she's gunned up. She rock-climbs!")
It didn't take long for Adams to come up against the sometimes harsh realities of show business. The real surprise was that she came across them in a Minnesota dinner theatre. She remembers a girl who tried to get ahead by spreading lies about her. "It was crazy. I mean, I was making $250 a week and we're fighting. It was so weird." What was she saying? "She would ask me things about my salary or my contract and because she was my friend I would tell her. Then she would go and tell people that I was talking about these things and I'd get into trouble with the person who ran the theatre, because it was tacky to talk about pay..."
If Adams wasn't sure she was cut out for the industry, she wasn't the only one. Her father - perhaps betraying those same no-nonsense Adams genes - would even tell her as much.
"I don't think he thought I'd achieve much success. I know that's horrible to say, but I just don't think I have, out of all of his children, I'm probably the least..." She pauses. "I just don't have a killer instinct, you know? So he thought I didn't have the composition for the business."
Even now, she says, he appears baffled by her success. "Not in a negative way, but I think he just finds it surprising. That's just his personality. He's funny like that. He's very supportive. He's just very pragmatic. He likes to tell me that the odds are stacked against me or his opinion of the person who's going to beat me."
Wait - you mean at the Oscars?
"Yeah!" she says, before setting off on a giggling fit. "I'm like, 'Thanks, Dad'! He'll be like, 'I just don't think it's going to be your year this year.' You know, 'Your role was good, but just didn't have it this year.' I'm like, dad, I know! You don't have to prep me for disappointment. I'm cool!"
(Her mother, on the other hand, was working in Starbucks when Adams landed her first Oscar nomination and proceeded to tell everyone who came in for a latte that her daughter was up for an Academy Award: "I'm like, Mom!").
It was only when she landed her movie debut in Drop Dead Gorgeous, which starred Kirstie Alley and happened to be filming in Minnesota, where Adams was living, that she first believed success was remotely possible.
"I always thought Hollywood was this huge, scary place where only movie stars made it, you know? Everyone seemed to be cut from a different cloth than I was. I said I was thinking about moving to LA, but I didn't know. And she [Alley] just said, 'Oh, you should move. You're young, you're funny, you'll work.' I'm young, I'm funny, I'll work! Great! That's all it took!"
When Amy Adams first worked with David O Russell, on 2010 film The Fighter, co-starring Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg, she hadn't done a role like it before.
From her first big part, in Catch Me If You Can (pigtails, braces, goofy grin), to Junebug (ponytail, pregnant, worried frown), to her first solo smash in Enchanted (Disney hair, Disney dress, the smile of someone the birds work for), to her role as a nun in Doubt (habit, habit, Oscar nomination number two), she'd carved a niche playing wide-eyed innocents and hopeful waifs and she was in rapid danger of getting stuck there.
As Adams will say to me at one point, "It took time for me to find my little niche. But then I had to break out of it."
And so, when Russell offered her the role of Charlene Fleming, a boozy, ballsy, foul-mouthed Boston barmaid - and the partner of Wahlberg's character, real-life boxer Mickey Ward - she jumped at the chance.
As Russell said at the time, "There are very few things that a director can have at his disposal better than an actress who's dying to break type. Amy was extremely motivated to play a sexy bitch and that's who the character of Charlene is. She said, 'As long as it happens between action and cut, I'll do anything." And I said, 'That's my kind of actress.'"
Naturally, Adams nailed it, picking up her third Oscar nomination and going on to be cast by the cream of modern American directors in roles as diverse as a celebrated artist (Big Eyes) and the wife of a cult leader (The Master), before working with Russell again as a con-artist in 2013's American Hustle, which co-starred Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Christian Bale.
It did not go well. By all accounts, Russell's behaviour on set was horrendous. He'd always had a reputation - he notoriously got into a fist fight with George Clooney during the shoot for Three Kings in 1999, with Clooney vowing never to work with the director again - but it was assumed he'd changed.
One of the leaked Sony emails - from journalist Jonathan Alter to his brother-in-law, Sony CEO Michael Lynton - would prove otherwise. Alter said Russell "so abused" Adams on the set of American Hustle that Christian Bale had to step in to defend her. "His abuse and lunatic behaviour are extreme even by Hollywood standards," wrote Alter.
Was this true? In a word: yes. Working with Russell was always kind of crazy, she says. On The Fighter, there was a lot of improv and energy, but this was something else.
"Even I was surprised on American Hustle, because on [his previous film] Silver Linings Playbook he had developed this wild, crazy way of working with Bradley [Cooper] and Jennifer [Lawrence]... and it was mania. I was like: wow."
He would talk and shout through every scene, screaming instructions at people while they worked. "I did a scene with Bradley where I have to hit him and he's yelling at me, 'Hit him! Hit him! Hit him! Hit him! HARDER! HARDER! HARDER! Really give it to him this time!'"
Is it true he made her cry? "He did. He was hard on me, that's for sure. It was a lot." Most days, she says, "I was really just devastated on set", and most days she returned home devastated too. "I mean, not every day, but most."
It wasn't the same, she says, for everyone - for example, "Jennifer [Lawrence] doesn't take any of it on. She's Teflon. And I am not Teflon. But I also don't like to see other people treated badly, you know what I mean?" - but she's clear that doesn't make it OK.
I begin to say you could argue that if the film is a success (it was nominated for ten Oscars and took $250m [£170m]), then the method is...
"No," she cuts in. "It's not OK with me. Life to me is more important than movies."
But as ever when you speak to Adams, it soon becomes clear her biggest concern is not even about herself, but her daughter. She was fearful, she says, she'd bring it home. "It really taught me how to separate work and home. Because I was like, I cannot bring this experience home with me to my daughter."
It's telling that later, when we talk about The Master's director Paul Thomas Anderson, she doesn't just praise his talent, but his character. "My daughter had gotten sick, and I was only getting two hours sleep a night. But Paul just accepts people, like, 'Yeah, you're really on the edge. OK, let's do the scene!' He doesn't take it on, you know?"
She wouldn't, she says, want to work with David O Russell again - at least, not any time soon.
"Not in the near future, no. I'll never say never, but with my daughter being where she's at, unless the role is less damaged and there's a way to mitigate the insanity then probably not. I just want to be a good mom, you know?"
The behaviour of David O Russell wasn't the only story to come from the American Hustle set. It emerged - again via the Sony leaks - that Adams and Lawrence were being paid less than their male co-stars (seven per cent of the profits to the girls; nine to Bale, Cooper and Jeremy Renner; or as Lawrence later put it, writing in Lena Dunham's online magazine, "the lucky people with dicks"). Lawrence said her reaction wasn't to get mad at Sony: "I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early."
Did Adams know that she was on less money than the guys?
"Yeah, I did. I didn't speak about it before and I'm probably not going to speak about it forever, because I disagreed with... not Jennifer per se, but people who had opinions on how women should go about negotiating. The truth is we hire people to negotiate on our behalf, men and women... I knew I was being paid less and I still agreed to do it because the option comes down to do it or don't do it. So you just have to decide if it's worth it for you. It doesn't mean I liked it. It doesn't mean I found it equitable. I just understood we were at that point."
Still, she says, she was proud of Lawrence for speaking out.
"I'm really proud of Jennifer. What I liked is that it was not necessarily about getting paid, or not getting paid."
It is, she adds, about something else. Something bigger - and something, looking back over our time together, maybe not just about Lawrence, and maybe not just about pay. "It's like we [women] have been conditioned to not be controversial, to not cause problems," she says. It's about being happy with speaking up, she says. "It's about," she says, "finding your voice."
Before we go - her to buy detergent, remember; me to get my flight - we talk briefly about how, incredibly, she still gets nerves when acting with big stars, ones she's surely now on the same level with. When she shot Charlie Wilson's War with Tom Hanks, for instance, her heart was beating so fast they could hear it on the soundtrack, and had to move her mic. Recently, she filmed with Forest Whitaker on Arrival and was so overcome she almost burst into tears ("I'm such a nerd. I was like, I need a second").
We talk, briefly, about the day she found out Philip Seymour Hoffman - who she'd worked with on Doubt and The Master - had died. It was the day of the Super Bowl, the Broncos vs the Seahawks (Adams is a Broncos fan), and she was hosting. She was still buying supplies, when she started getting the texts. "Luckily, the party was with my family, so I dismissed myself..." But understandably, she doesn't want to say too much.
"Philip was awesome. I don't mind talking about Philip, but out of respect for his family, I don't want to take on their loss as my own. Also, it's everyone's loss, right?"
However, the thing she talks about most is the one subject all the others keep coming back to: her daughter, Aviana.
The time she took her to Disneyland's Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique ("which is awesome by the way") and bought her a tiara, which she later sat in and mournfully sang "It's The Hard- Knock Life" ("Oh, the irony! It was so funny").
Or the complaints she makes at her mother's constant singing: "Like, urrrrgh, Mom!"
Or how worried she gets at school shows: "She gets super serious and concentrated."
Or, if she's done a drawing, she'll look at another kid's efforts and declare, simply, on balance, theirs is better, and no amount of motherly reassurance will dissuade her.
"She's like, no, no, it's better. She's so practical! And I totally get it! I'm going to have to really boost her. But I feel like she's got the kind of personality I can support. It's good - because it means she's got her own internal compass, you know?"
She is, clearly, her mother's daughter.
"Because that's what I would have said too."