It is uniquely satisfying to watch a Disney princess unfold herself on to a Beverly Hills balcony, stretch her pale limbs out beside the floral arrangements, and tell you how she used to beat the crap out of the boys at school. But then there is something uniquely satisfying about the whole career of Amy Adams, a 36-year-old American actor whose ability to move from adorable to angry, from ditzy to deathly, has seen her bash her charming way to becoming America's new sweetheart. With two Oscar nominations already, for Junebug (a 2005 film in which she plays a naive young chatterbox who gives birth to a stillborn) and Doubt (where she and Meryl Streep are nuns who uncover a priest's secret relationship), she may be about to hit third time lucky.
Her new film The Fighter, in which she plays the girlfriend of a boxer (Mark Wahlberg) and revives his stalled career in the ring, will make a lot of noise come awards season. What if she gets Oscar nominated again? "I don't think about it," she says, fibbing slightly.
And yet all anybody seems to really know about Adams is that she was raised a Mormon, but then worked at Hooters – the American pub chain famous for its busty barmaids. "If only I had known it'd form the sole focus of my press for the rest of my life," she says, looking very chirpy at LA's Four Seasons hotel. She is quite infectiously excitable, insisting we go and enjoy ourselves outdoors before panicking about her sun allergies and dashing back in again. I tell her I'm happy to discuss her acting methods, and her previous roles as the frantically blogging cook in Julie & Julia, the single mother in Sunshine Cleaning, the all-singing, all-twirling star of Enchanted… "Oh no, don't be silly," she says, "it's all about my three weeks at Hooters. All anybody wants to know about is Hooters." She lets rip an uproarious laugh. "I owe it all to the boob bar."
Except, this time around, it is relevant, because in The Fighter Adams plays a barmaid – though Charlene Fleming is no good-time-gal. A tough, nuanced worker, she advocates the sacrifices her man needs to make if he is to succeed as a professional boxer, even if that means ripping his troubled Irish-American family apart. Adams is excellent, but she carries the part as much through her body as her lines.
"It was definitely non-verbal," she agrees, sunning herself for a brief, delicious moment. "David O Russell, the director, was more interested in what Charlene didn't say than what she did say. It would have been so easy for me to get caught up in the big personalities of all the characters around me, but David challenged me to undercut them and find power in the silence, in the stillness." Her background in theatre helped "because there's nowhere to hide on stage." she says. "Even if you're not talking, you're still there, exposed – which I love."
The Fighter is based on a true story, and Adams has now met the real Charlene (who complained, drolly, that she'd never have worn fishnets and a cut-off shirt. "I told her the belly shirt was to get more tips. She was like, 'Damn, I should have thought of that!'") After reading 20 pages of script, which was all Russell could show her at the time, she knew she wanted the part. "But I am known for playing characters with something of an innocence to them, so there's no real way to tell a director you can play a tough role. You go, 'I'm tough!' And then you sound like an idiot. Or you're polite and say, sweetly, 'Oh yes I can play tough,' and then you don't sound like you can play tough at all. Many of my previous roles had a certain energy which people call naivety, and which I think of as curiosity. But Charlene isn't curious – Charlene doesn't give a shit. So the only way to do it was to do it."
Adams grew up in Colorado, but was actually born in Italy, as her father's military job moved the family from base to base (he later became a professional restaurant singer). She was the middle child of seven, raised Mormon until her parents divorced and left the church when she was 11. She says the faith instilled good values in her "about being positive. Bringing good energy into a room. I think sometimes people can mistake that for being simple."
But this upbringing prepared her well for The Fighter, with its atmosphere of sprawling families, and the gym, and the punch-ups – especially since her mother became a semi-professional bodybuilder. "I think it was a way to reclaim her own body after giving birth so many times. Mom worked in the gym where she trained, so we hung out there and we terrorised the place. We were always very physically fit and involved in sports. I was a pretty scrappy, tough kid; I got in all sorts of fights at school. I defended myself – boys didn't mess with me. But as one of seven children you have to fight for everything anyway."
She sang in the school choir, gave up athletics to pursue dance, and trained as an apprentice with a local dance company in Douglas County, having decided against going to college – something she has at times regretted. She developed a passion for musical theatre, supported herself by working in Gap, and then followed her big sister to Hooters "with a certain innocence of what it was about". She relocated to Minneapolis to spend three years performing in dinner theatres, until, off work with a sprain, she successfully auditioned for the 1999 comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, which was being filmed in Minnesota. Her co-star Kirstie Alley persuaded her to move to LA the same year.
Adams concedes her rise has been almost too good to be true. "In Catch Me If You Can, where I had to make out with Leonardo DiCaprio, and there's Christopher Walken, and Spielberg directing, I was like, 'Aargh, what am I doing here, this is amazing!'" It didn't help that she had been the girl who went to see Titanic again and again because she had such a crush on DiCaprio. "When I moved to LA, all the people back home were saying, 'So if you ever run into Leonardo DiCaprio...' and I'm like, 'I know, right? Imagine!' And then I end up doing a scene with him, with braces on my teeth, and pigtails, kissing him. I had a rude awakening and realised he was never going to leave Gisele Bündchen for me."
This is the thing about Adams – she can look gloriously pretty, but never quite stunning in that Hollywood, bone-structured kind of way. And she knows it. "Once I moved to LA, there was a dark moment of trying to keep up with the girls I thought were pretty. Until I realised that's the stupidest thing you can do because people are so pretty in LA! It's not even about the actresses, it's the girl waiting on you at Starbucks. You're like, what? Do you really look like that at six o'clock in the morning? So I took guidance from some really great people who said: 'Amy, you can make a decision right now to be the person who struggles to be the pretty woman in every film. Or you can be an actress.' So I said – OK. I get it. I'm not really cut out to play the most beautiful creature on earth."
One actress she has bonded with is Emily Blunt, her co-star in Sunshine Cleaning, though Adams insists she always makes an idiot of herself any time Blunt is around. "Oh, I want to say something really snarky and clever about her but it won't work. I'm not as funny as her. In fact, I'm way nerdier about her than she is about me – every time I see her I come over all…" she turns into a breathless panting fangirl, not unlike her character in Junebug, "HiEmilyhowyoudoingEmilyhaven'tseenyou foralongtimeEmily!!"
This year, we'll see more of her range: first up is the adaptation of Kerouac's On the Road, directed by Walter Salles, in which she plays Jane, "the emotionally damaged junkie mother". Then there's The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made, in which she is one of a trio of humans who help the Muppets reunite to save their theatre from a dodgy oil tycoon.
Adams became pregnant after she finished filming The Fighter, and gave birth to a daughter, Aviana. (She met her fiancé Darren Le Gallo in an acting class.) "I highly recommend having children – it felt like exactly what my body was supposed to do at that point. More than anything else ever, it just felt physically right being pregnant. My friends without kids say, 'Oh I don't know how you do it, getting so tired.' And I just think, 'I don't know how they don't do it.' It's a huge relief not being the most important person in the room anymore. I hadn't realised quite how sick of myself I'd become."
With three movies out this year, it seems nobody else is getting sick of her. Indeed, I have an inkling she'd be perfect to play Kate Middleton in the inevitable biopic as she can do that poised, steely and yet a little shy English rose thing to a tee. As long as she can punch her way out of any competition from Emily Blunt.
The Fighter is out on 4 February
Sophie Heawood is a freelance journalist