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The Nineties Slacker Starter Pack was a scruffy hat and a bong, a vast comic-book collection, and a crush on Joey Lauren Adams. The crush was probably the easiest of the four. In Kevin Smith’s queer-ish romcom Chasing Amy, or the Adam Sandler comedy Big Daddy, the actor emanated a sunny yet mercurial dream-girl quality. That choppy haircut. That askew smile. That smokey voice. You absolutely had to know more about her. But what happens when Hollywood wants you to play the girl next door and you want to play the messy weirdo down the street?
“I just didn’t want to play ‘the girlfriend’ anymore,” Adams recalls today, rolling her eyes. She remembers telling a studio executive this very thing, right after she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Chasing Amy in 1998. No problem, the executive told her – she even had a script she knew Adams would love. “Would I play the guy’s girlfriend?” Adams asked. “And she’s like, ‘Well, no – they’re engaged’.” Adams shoots a look both cool and withering. “Because that’s such a big difference, you know?”
That meeting was the start of a years-long epiphany. The roles Adams got seemed to get less interesting as her fame grew – it didn’t help that her first real movie part, in the 1993 coming-of-age classic Dazed and Confused, was so special – and living in the company town of Los Angeles proved depleting. So she decided to make her own film, a tender drama loosely inspired by her hometown called Come Early Morning, and flee Hollywood entirely. First to Mississippi, then back to her home state of Arkansas.
When she acts now – as in the black comedy Greedy People, which is released digitally on Monday – it’s often in films made by friends, or by scrappy newcomers she’d like to help out. Speaking on a video call from the Hot Springs, Arkansas, lake house she shares with her husband, the cinematographer Brian Vilim, the 56 year old just seems incredibly level-headed. Her hair is dirty-blonde, her eyes wide, and that distinct voice of hers, all dark and crackly, remains intact.
“I’m in my fifties, I have more grit and more lines on my face,” she says, proudly. “Now I get to play character roles!” Case in point: Greedy People. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Yesterday’s Himesh Patel as two small-town cops who accidentally kill a woman and decide to stage the crime scene as a robbery, stealing a mystery bag of money in the process. A problem? The woman’s husband (Tim Blake Nelson) had hired a hitman to take her out anyway. Dark, slippery, Coen-esque misunderstandings ensue, with Lily James and Red Rocket’s Simon Rex among the other circling vultures.
Adams, meanwhile, pops up in a few scenes as a foul-mouthed local. She was already tight with the film’s director Potsy Ponciroli, and years ago they’d developed a role for her in a TV series that ultimately didn’t get made. “I told him I wanted to be the wacky one and not the straight person,” Adams remembers. “I wanted to get a bad perm and just be a character.” When Greedy People came about, and Ponciroli said there was a similar-sounding role in it, Adams was ecstatic. “I didn’t even want to read the script – just sign me up!”
Yes, I knew Harvey. Yes, he was an a*****e. Yes, he treated you like s***. And, yes, a lot of us experienced the casting couch environment
The way Adams describes it, her earlier career in Hollywood was a mixture of weird flukes and palpable disappointment. Take Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s seminal hangout movie about Seventies teens. Adams was 23 and had only a few TV credits to her name when she was cast, but that was sort of how the film rolled: her co-stars Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey and eventual indie queen Parker Posey were nobodies, too, all of them flown out to Austin, Texas, to dance to classic rock, wear bell-bottom trousers and pretend to be stoned. “Universal Pictures would never make that film now, and especially not with unknowns,” she says, wistfully. Adams played one of the sunny minions of Posey’s high-school mean girl, and she remembers it being one of the happiest periods of her life.
“They kept all the actors in Austin pretty much the whole time,” she says. That meant the large ensemble would float in and out of one another’s scenes, bringing to life the feel of a real community. “And when we weren’t working, we would just hang out in hotel lobbies, stay up all night, see live music…” When production ended, she and Posey climbed up a tree and watched the sun rise. “It was just so profound, and I didn’t get what I was feeling,” she says. “Parker was like, ‘you’re feeling bittersweet’. I never knew the meaning of that word until then, because that’s what it was. Making that film was so special, and it was so sad for it to be over.”
The part few remember is that, upon release, Dazed and Confused underperformed at the box office, barely making back its $5.9m (£5.2m) budget. Likewise her film Mallrats, Kevin Smith’s 1995 kids-in-a-shopping-centre comedy that served as the follow-up to his indie smash Clerks. They’d eventually become cult classics, but at the time they didn’t much help Adams’s profile. She got typecast as “the girlfriend”. She was often the only woman in big casts of men. She’d play characters who’d devolve over the course of production – her Big Daddy role was initially written as a “badass bartender”, but it had changed to a slightly bland custody lawyer by the time she actually got to set. And she’s very aware that when she was cast in more interesting parts, those films tended to be directed by women.
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“The hindsight of it all is so hard,” she says. She remembers reading an essay by the actor-turned-filmmaker Sarah Polley (of Certain Women fame) and published at the height of the Harvey Weinstein allegations – Weinstein’s Miramax Films produced Chasing Amy – and seeing so much of her own story in it. “Yes, I knew Harvey. Yes, he was an a*****e. Yes, he treated you like s***. And, yes, a lot of us experienced the casting couch environment. Even when I was in Arkansas dreaming of moving to LA, that was my mom’s biggest fear – in every business you’ll get men who try to use their power to make sexual advances.” But what stuck out most to her in the essay was how Polley wrote about the climate in Nineties Hollywood, and the things young women were just expected to put up with.
“That idea of ‘it’s all just fun – we’re just having fun on set!’ And you go along with it, because that’s how it was – even if it made you feel uncomfortable, or if you’re doing a wardrobe fitting and for some reason the male producers are in the room. ‘They want you to wear a padded bra; they want more skin’. Actors coming in and showing you their dick – it was just on and on and on.” That said, it wasn’t just Hollywood, she insists. “That was also your life in the real world as well, you know?”
Chasing Amy, meanwhile, was a blessing and a curse. It was a film partly inspired by Adams’s real-life relationship with Smith, and the insecurity he felt about dating someone who’d lived a far sexier and more adventurous life. In Amy, this became the story of a comic-book artist (played by Ben Affleck) who is horrified to discover his perfect woman (Adams’s Alyssa) is a lesbian. Taking the role proved difficult: it was a great script and a great opportunity, but rooted in juvenilia and a relationship that was, back then, tricky to navigate. She and Smith are close now and can joke about their complicated history – but it took time. “Kevin wrote Amy about our relationship and all the s*** he gave me,” she says. “Then he gets the glory and becomes such a great person and I’m, like, left in the s***.”
It was the slow building of such indignities that convinced Adams to leave LA. That and a night on the town with two strangers she’d just met. “I invited these two random horticulturalists to this party and they were like: ‘it’s two in the morning, what’s the special occasion?’. And there wasn’t one,” she says, sadly. “I was just staying out because I had nothing to do the next day. It was so destructive to me.”
So Adams began to write. By 2006, she was a filmmaker herself. Come Early Morning starred Ashley Judd as an Arkansas slacker looking for love in all the wrong places – it’s a moving, scrappy indie that drew acclaim at the time (“Adams, a wonderful actress who works too rarely, is a thoughtful filmmaker who knows her characters and how to tell their stories with no wrong steps,” the film critic Roger Ebert once wrote). It’s worth seeking out. “I loved it,” Adams says. “I just remember feeling like [behind the camera] was where I was meant to be. But directing is an even harder world to break into than acting – I would love to do more.”
In the meantime, though, she’s content. She likes her life in Hot Springs, and dipping her toe back into the acting world whenever she feels like it. Hollywood is so different now anyway, she says. Auditions are on tape, you barely know some of the agents who represent you, and often you only meet your directors a few hours before you’re on set. She tells me a story of being in a bar in New Orleans some years ago, and catching the eye of a glamorous older woman sitting in the corner.
“It was happy hour, and she was in a pillbox hat and a Jackie O suit – this tiny little woman,” Adams says. “And it turned out that she was an old actress – Verita Thompson – who’d dated Humphrey Bogart and had this whole career.” They got to talking about acting, the woman asking Adams “which studio she was with”. “And I was like, wait, do I tell her that actors aren’t under contract with studios any more? Do I tell her things have changed? And I didn’t, I just said, ‘Oh, I’m with Paramount’. She’s like, ‘Oooh, they’re good’.”
Adams laughs, one of those big, husky, Chasing Amy ones. “And now I’m at this point where the industry has changed so much from when I started.” That’s why she remembers the glamorous older actor in the bar so fondly. “Like, I’m totally her now!”
‘Greedy People’ is available on digital platforms from Monday 23 September
