“You ever look around and wonder if we deserve all this?”

Save for her Southern drawl, Amy Adams delivers this line in Cape Fear with a winsomeness befitting of her character in Disney’s Enchanted. When her on-screen husband, played by Patrick Wilson, replies “No,” the two kiss, completing the series’ sole moment of storybook sweetness. But after he walks away, Adams narrows her gaze. Her brow drops and the ominous score roars. This is no fairytale.

This scene plays out in the first minutes of Apple TV+‘s spin on the 1962 and 1991 movies of the same name. The films and the new show are all based on John D. MacDonald‘s novel The Executioners. It’s not a stretch to say that each new take on Cape Fear is more twisted than the last, or that this one is the most unsettling.

“Every character is carrying secrets. That is really compelling to me,” Adams tells me.

She joins our call from the sunniest corner of her So-Cal kitchen. “I always do calls in my kitchen, which is probably not the best place,” she admits.

For Adams, California has been home for over 25 years. Early in her L.A. days, she met her now-husband in an acting class. Now, they have a teenage daughter. On the other side of her lens, her three dogs patter around her kitchen. “There’s always a lot of activity here,” she says.

So the story goes, after growing up with a big family in Colorado, Adams got her start performing in Minnesota’s Chanhassen Dinner Theatres. Then, she had a choice to make: pick up and move to L.A. to be an actress, or relocate to New York City to pursue dance. “An injury sort of made the decision for me and I ended up deciding to move to L.A.,” she recounts to me. The rest is history.

Now, Adams is toplining the cast of Cape Fear with Wilson and Javier Bardem as her co-stars, and names like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg on board as co-executive producers.

She stars as Anna Bowden, a lawyer whose former client, Max Cady—played by Bardem, at his eeriest—is freed from prison. Bardem, Adams says, is “absolutely terrifying on screen and probably the nicest, most joyful, playful person off screen.” When Cady is released, Anna and her family’s lives begin to unravel.

Adams was creator and showrunner Nick Antosca‘s first choice to play Anna. “I couldn’t imagine anybody who would be better at walking the tightrope between tough and fragile,” he writes in an email, “especially in the feverish, slightly heightened nightmare tone of the show.”

When she’d sprinkle little moments of humour or humanity, it surprised him. “She protects what’s there but elevates it in ways you don’t expect,” Antosca adds.

“[Anna] is at once guilty and angry and scared and hiding things,” Adams explains. “[It’s] about the secrets we’re keeping and how those secrets degrade trust and degrade relationships.” She pauses. “[That’s] on a deeper level—it’s also just scary and creepy and gross.” This is not new territory for Adams.

At first, wide-eyed roles were her trademark. Early on, she nabbed Academy Award nominations for her roles in Junebug, as an optimistic mother-to-be, and Doubt, where she played a naive nun in the midst of a crisis.

Then, she shed her ingénue skin and graduated into darker material. Between 2011 and 2014, she received Oscar nods for playing a no-nonsense bartender in The Fighter, the Lady Macbeth-esque wife of a cult leader in The Master, and a glamorous, groovy con artist in American Hustle.

As we’ve covered her career, I saw such a shift [in the roles she took] when she had her daughter,” Dane McDonald says. McDonald co-hosts the Chasing Amy Adams podcast with Louis Peitzman. Each week, they rewatch and discuss Adams’ films in chronological order.

Why would one dedicate over 50 episodes to relitigating one actress’ work? Well, there’s just something about Amy. “There’s a quietness and a grace that Amy has, that people want to dig into more,” McDonald says. This is coupled with a ferocity that pokes out when you least expect it. “She is very, very capable of tapping into that [ferocity], but what I think makes those performances so evocative is the fragility behind them,” McDonald says.

Adams has taken on faces we recognize and introduced us to ones we don’t. She’s shapeshifted into Amelia Earhart, Lois Lane, Margaret Keane, Lynne Cheney (another Oscar-nominated turn), a linguistics professor who communicates with aliens, a home chef blogging her way through ennui, a divorcee who befriends A.I., a recluse who spies on her neighbours, a gallerist in a tumultuous marriage, a new mother morphing into a dog, and J.D. Vance’s mom.

In the past, she likened her creative process to catching a virus—less about portraying, more about full-body possession. A fever you can’t sweat out. “I’m sure [it’s] irritatingly thorough for some people,” she laughs. She always maps out a history that fills the gaps leading up to the moment the audience first meets her character.

“It’s all imagination work,” she explains. Then, something clicks and the connection between Adams and her character feels visceral. “It’s so fun building this, until I feel [my character] in my body.” At that point, Adams tells me, “I know how [my character] feels about things. I don’t have to question how to play something because I innately start to interpret things through her lens,” she says. “Her lens becomes my lens.”

The ultimate tell is the pronouns. “When I start talking about a character from an ‘I’ place instead of a ‘her’ or ‘she’ place, I know we’ve integrated in a way that’s gonna be helpful to the process,” she says. “It’s a state of being in the character as opposed to performing as a character.”

This grinds to a halt once she wraps for the day and walks through her front door. “When I’m home, I’m very Amy,” she says. “There were definitely times in my career when it got blurred and I sort of overdid it on the character thing.”

Parenting shifted her perspective on where to create boundaries in her work. “Once my daughter became older, and old enough to become aware, I didn’t want to bring the situations that I was going through on set, or as the character, home,” she says. “I’ve worked really hard to create that separation, so I’m not, like, living as this [character] going through a hard time. You carry some of it with you as you’re living this drama-slash-trauma on set.”

Adams is the last of a particular kind of movie star. The kind that cemented her status before a social media following became a prerequisite for actors and content creation was a non-negotiable facet of film promo. At one point, Adams tried using Instagram, but it wasn’t for her. “It didn’t feel organic,” she says. “I’m kind of boring. I am really routine-driven. I go to the same places. I’m already so settled in my ways that I would have to hunt for something to post about outside of work,” she says.

This groundedness is likely a matter of timing. By the time Adams became one of Hollywood’s most in-demand leading ladies, she was already well into adulthood. For actresses of her ilk, this is an anomaly—her breakthrough role, Junebug, came at 31. “I think coming into the busier, more forward-facing times in my career, I was already into my thirties,” she says. Learning how to handle fame came after she settled into the certainty of who she was. “I came in with my husband already [and] with my friend group. I just kept living.”

Now at 51, she’s perfectly content. “I’m more relaxed than I’ve been,” she admits. “I feel more centered than I ever have. I think part of that is just being able to look back and be really grateful for what I’ve been able to do. And then look forward with a lot of excitement for what’s to come.”

Next, she’ll be appearing in Taika Waititi‘s sci-fi film Klara and the Sun, then, in the upcoming Star Wars opposite Ryan Gosling. She has a full plate and doesn’t take it lightly. “I just try to hold opportunity with both hands open and not try to fight so much,” she says. “It’s nice. It’s a very freeing part of aging, for me, anyway. Just letting go.”

Cape Fear is available to stream on Apple TV+ on June 5.

Feature image dress by Valentino; earrings by Engelbert 1920; ring by Fernando Jorge.
Words by Sumiko Wilson
Photography by Nino Muñoz (Copious Management)
Styling by Petra Flannery (Pepper Style)
Makeup by Stephen Sollitto (TMG LA)
Hair by John D (Forward Artists)
Tailoring by Ina Lace
Manicurist Stephanie Stone (Forward Artists)
Stylist Assistant: Marco Milani
Photo Assistants: William Mathieu, Benjamin Joseph
Tech: Gray Hamner
Production by Hyperion 
Location: Smashbox Studios 
Editorial and Creative Director: Sahar Nooraei 
Art Director: Jessica Hui 
Fashion Director: Haley Dach 
Social Media/Digital Editor: Roxanne Tam-Soltani