Long in touch with her ‘more feral side,’ Amy Adams connects with ‘Nightbitch’

Amy Adams is not the kind of actor who spends a lot of time talking about her family life. You could be a fan of her shape-shifting work in “Arrival” or “Sharp Objects” and have no idea that she has been married to her husband, Darren Le Gallo, for nearly a decade, and that they share a 14-year-old daughter, Aviana.

But “Nightbitch” (in theaters Friday), a surreal comedy in which she plays an exhausted mother who discovers the feral side of parenthood, is not your typical project, which is why on a recent morning Adams finds herself on Zoom with me, having an in-depth chat about toddler nap schedules and the difficulty of making friends as a new mom.

“The nature of doing this film, and what I learned through it, has felt very personal,” says a slightly groggy Adams. A deliberate speaker who chooses each word carefully and apologizes profusely for being inarticulate (she’s not), Adams says she prefers listening to yapping about herself. “Nightbitch” is the kind of film that has compelled viewers to open up to Adams about their experiences as parents and spouses. “The ones that have really struck me are people sharing their postpartum mental health journeys,” she says. “It’s a real gift to do something that helps people feel seen.”

Written and directed by Marielle Heller, the film follows Adams’ character, credited only as “Mother,” a former artist who sidelined her career to stay at home with her toddler son but finds full-time parenting more physically and emotionally draining than she could have imagined. Sleep-deprived, socially isolated and frustrated with her well-meaning but clueless “Husband” (Scoot McNairy) who travels frequently for work, Mother starts to experience bizarre physical symptoms — a heightened sense of smell, an intense craving for meat, hair growing in strange places. At first disturbed by these changes, she comes to embrace them.

Adapted from the 2021 magical-realist novel by Rachel Yoder that powerfully tapped into COVID-19-era rage of mothers across the country, “Nightbitch” has reductively been described as “the movie where Amy Adams turns into a dog.” But it is more than that — a darkly hilarious, uncomfortably honest exploration of how motherhood can turn you into someone you no longer recognize.

Expressing any sort of ambivalence about parenting is a surefire way to provoke social-media outrage. “Nightbitch” is clear-eyed about the challenges that come with raising children, particularly in a country where mothers are frequently vilified but receive less government support and face worse health outcomes than their counterparts around the world. (American parents are so stressed out that it’s become a public health issue, according to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.)

Yet as far-fetched as it may seem when, say, Mother discovers a wiry tail growing out of a welt on her lower back, most of what she goes through — from the sleep-training panic to the endless batches of macaroni and cheese — will resonate powerfully with anyone who has ever cared for a small child.

Adams, who is also a producer on “Nightbitch,” felt deeply connected to the book, the movie rights to which Annapurna Pictures secured in a competitive auction months before it was published. “It had this internal monologue that felt like it had reached into recesses of your mind and said things you weren’t allowed to say out loud,” she says.

But the tricky nature of the source material demanded the right filmmaker, ideally, someone who had something to say about motherhood. Adams was a fan of Heller’s work, including 2015’s “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” and 2018’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” — funny, nonjudgmental stories about difficult protagonists, told with a distinctive visual style. “Then I found out that she had just had a baby and was living in a cabin,” Adams recalls of the director, who was then isolated with her family in rural Connecticut. “I was like, ‘If she gets this, she’s really going to get this.’ “

“Everything we connected about early on was about being mothers and wives and working women who are trying to balance art and our family lives,” says Heller, who has two children with her husband, filmmaker Jorma Taccone.

Heller made significant changes to Yoder’s novel, toning down some of its more outlandish twists while delving more deeply into the cracks in Mother’s marriage, a partnership that strains under the weight of unspoken resentment. In one of the film’s most consequential scenes, an exasperated Husband asks, “What happened to the woman I married?” Mother, enraged, fires back: “She died in childbirth.”

Adams followed a different, but equally intense, journey into motherhood. Her big career breakthrough came in 2005, with an Oscar-nominated performance in the indie “Junebug.” After more than a decade of struggle and professional setbacks, she was suddenly working nonstop and a regular on the awards circuit. In 2010, she gave birth, then returned to work at the same frenzied pace, filming “On the Road” and “The Muppets” back to back while promoting “The Fighter” — all before her daughter’s first birthday.

“I think that’s the most tired I’ve ever been,” says Adams. “The reason I got so exhausted is I never wanted to not be there for her. I would work and then I would make sure that I was doing everything at home.” At the time, she adds, “I was the main breadwinner in the family. It was a different level of responsibility that I felt.”

Adams channeled some of this new-mom delirium into Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master,” “the most intense role that I did when [my daughter] was young,” she says. The production included frequent night shoots. Adams would nap for a few hours when she could, spend the day with Aviana, then return to set in the evening. “That’s the most in touch with my primal self I’d ever been,” she says, “but I loved it. My philosophy has always been to bring your experiences into what you’re working on. It can be very cathartic.”

Adams, who recently turned 50, eventually found more balance. She’s also grown less concerned with making people like her. “I recognize that I’m going to be scrutinized, I recognize that I’m aging and I’m treating it like a blessing,” she says. “I have a totally different perspective on it than I did when my daughter was born. I definitely put different pressures on myself when she was younger, but I think part of the wonderful thing about having a daughter is [that] I want her to see a healthy, balanced, happy mom, so I’ve really fought for that.”

Adams approaches her role in “Nightbitch” with fearless gusto and a wild physicality, sticking her face in bowls of meat, running barefoot in the streets with a pack of dogs, and rolling around on the ground in a playful montage set to Weird Al Yankovic’s “Dare to Be Stupid.” She also looks very much like a weary everymom, wearing little-to-no makeup and dressing for comfort rather than style. This lack of costume was helpful, Adams says, “because I was confronted with the very raw version of myself every day. I couldn’t hide behind things.”

When it came to Adams’ performance, the goal was “making sure that there was never a moment where self-consciousness peeked in,” Heller says. “A lot of the work was making Amy feel very safe in the environment, to trust me that she could just show all of herself.” She spoke to Adams about “what it feels like to be somebody who’s just had a baby and doesn’t feel connected to their body,” she says.

For Adams, it was not difficult to tap into her character’s more primal impulses: she is one of seven children, raised in a military family that moved frequently throughout her childhood. “I’ve always made the joke that we were feral, free-range kids,” she says. “I’ve always been someone who’s really had a strong internal monologue with a more feral side of myself.”

Her parents ultimately divorced and Adams’ mother, a former member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, became a professional bodybuilder, often bringing her kids to the gym with her. “She was the OG Nightbitch,” the actor says. “She got to a point where she was like, ‘I had seven children and I now have to start figuring out who I am in the world.’ Our experiences are so vastly different because she started having kids at 19. I was 35 when I had my daughter. I had lived a totally different span of my life being able to explore myself.”

Adams’ family background also enabled her to relate to one of the few unique details we learn about her character in “Nightbitch,” that she was raised in a Mennonite community by a mother who harbored artistic aspirations of her own. Adams approaches each new character she plays by trying to understand their religious background, a technique she developed early on in her career with acting coach Warner Loughlin. Someone’s faith “sets so much of their values into place,” she says.

Adams maintained faith in her process as “Nightbitch,” which was delayed a year because of the Hollywood strikes, finally premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and prompted a dizzying array of responses. Along with speculation about whether this would finally be the role to snag an Oscar win for the six-time nominee, there were howls from some critics put off by the film’s candid portrayal of various bodily functions and its undiluted channeling of female anger.

Becoming a mother engenders a brutal kind of honesty, says Heller, one that she tried to capture in “Nightbitch.”

“When you have a kid, you’re dealing with poop and throw-up,” she says. “Your relationship to bodily fluids has changed, and your relationship to anything being ‘gross’ has changed. There’s nothing precious about it, right? It’s whatever the opposite of precious is. I’ve never really seen that depicted [on-screen] in a way that feels truthful.”

Adams suggests that some of the negative responses to “Nightbitch” stem from confusion over the film’s “very intentional female gaze.”

“Only at certain times do we get a glimpse inside of the husband’s mind — otherwise, we’re living squarely inside of a woman’s mind,” she says. “It’s very uncommon for a film to not have a male gaze.” Adams is trying to meet these reactions with curiosity instead of anger. “I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s what you got from that?’ “ She also prefers to focus on viewers who recognize themselves in the movie.

“I had a friend write me and say, ‘My kids just left the house but I still identify so deeply with this, because I’m in a transitional period and am feeling invisible in the world. I have this deep sense of insignificance. To hear your character say it — I didn’t realize how much I felt it until that moment.’ “ Adams pauses to gather herself, then apologizes for becoming emotional. “That means so much more to me than someone having a reaction to seeing menstrual blood.”