Amy Adams is one of the most consistently nominated actresses in Hollywood history, a performer who built her reputation through a string of wildly different roles without ever repeating herself across any two of them. She broke through with Junebug (2005), earned her first Oscar nomination, and followed it with Enchanted (2007), Doubt (2008), The Fighter (2010), American Hustle (2013), Big Eyes (2014), and Arrival (2016), collecting six Academy Award nominations before winning felt less like a question of whether and more like a question of when. The industry’s failure to hand her a trophy remains one of the more baffling ongoing omissions in awards history.

On screen, Adams operates through a deceptive softness that she has used repeatedly to wrong-foot audiences, presenting an open, warm face while the character underneath runs far colder or stranger than the surface suggests. Her blue eyes and red hair give her a wholesome approachability that she has spent her career using as a trap, and the best of her performances in American Hustle and Sharp Objects (2018) show an actress at her most dangerous when she seems at her most guileless. She remains one of the most respected performers working today, the actress whose next project other actors quietly pay attention to.