Amy Adams Once Shared 1 of the Weirdest Nights of Her Life Involved Joaquin Phoenix and Naked Extras
Actor Amy Adams is very familiar with working alongside Joker star Joaquin Phoenix. Although the two are good friends, there was one movie scene Adams worried her co-star might’ve sabotaged. So, Adams took matters into her own hands.
Amy Adams panicked when Joaquin Phoenix fell asleep for a scene in ‘The Master’
Adams and Phoenix collaborated on the feature The Master with late star Phillip Seymour Hoffman. But before the 2012 drama, Adams was already a bit familiar with Phoenix. She’d already done a couple of projects with the Oscar-winner. So, given their history, she bonded with Phoenix seemingly on the same level that she bonded with Hoffman.
“I’ve worked with Joaquin twice now and I feel like I have started to see his humanity through his process,” Adams once told Collider. “So I am very loyal to him and I have worked with Phillip several times as well. I think they are just very open and honest people, and so it is hard for them to sit in a room and be looked at. It is hard for anyone. I have said it before that I think I am more of a people pleaser. So this is where I am all good.”
But there was one scene in the feature where Adams had to wake Phoenix up. To her frustration, however, Phoenix wouldn’t budge during the take. So she decided to improvise.
“I didn’t know what to do, I freaked out because I was like, ‘No, here’s how the scene goes,’” Adams said in an interview with Variety. “I’d pour water on his head now. I’d be like, ‘You want to play that game, Joaquin? Here you go.’”
Amy Adams couldn’t believe what was happening in this ‘Master’ scene with Joaquin Phoenix
In The Master, Adams and Phoenix participated in a scene that caught the former completely off guard. The scene in question consisted of the Napoleon star watching several women dancing in the nude.
“That was one of the weirdest nights of my life because I was right at this level,” Adams recalled. “The reason it was so surreal for me was because typically when we see women naked in our society, aside from in life, they are acting like they know they are naked. But here the idea is that we are all acting like we have clothes on. So to see women of all ages and body types jumping around and dancing and very unselfconsciously presenting themselves – that was so surreal because you just don’t see that. So that was part of it. It was just ‘we are naked’ but everyone was acting like they had clothes on. It was very bizarre.”
Adams also shared that she wasn’t originally written into the scene in question. So perhaps that made her even more ill prepared for the sequence.
Amy Adams initially first met Joaquin Phoenix for a film she was rejected for
The Master wasn’t the first feature where Phoenix and Adams locked eyes on each other. The two officially met for the Phoenix movie Ladder 49. The film saw Phoenix portray a firefighter reflecting back on his life while experiencing a traumatic moment.
In an interview both Phoenix and Adams did with Entertainment Tonight, Adams revealed she auditioned with Phoenix for a role in the film. But she didn’t get the part. Since then, however, she worked with Phoenix a few more times.
In addition to The Master, Adams also worked with Phoenix in the Spike Jones and Scarlett Johansson film Her. According to IMDb, the filmmaker locked the two actors in a room for hours so they can get to know one another better. This resulted in the friendship the two enjoy today. Phoenix also dubbed Adams with the nickname Angry Adams.
“Because she’s the antithesis of angry, so it’s funny,” Phoenix quipped.
