Between the panting and the fanny pack, Ms. Adams, already a five-time Oscar-nominated actress at 43, had begun to wonder what she must look like.
“I feel like I always … I don’t know if disappoint is the right word,” she said, zipping away the sunscreen. She was wearing dark, printed leggings, a black gift-shop ball cap with her signature strawberry tresses pulled through it and a black T-shirt that read, in big cutesy letters, “Better in real life.” “But whenever people meet me they’re always like ‘Really? That’swho you are?’”
She stopped for a moment, then deadpanned the answer that she always thinks but never says: “Yes. It is.”
She’ll star in July in the HBO mini-series “Sharp Objects,” her first television role since she began starring in features more than a decade ago. The eight-episode arc, based on the controlled burn of a novel by Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”), marks a departure of another sort, too — Ms. Adams’s performance, as a hard-drinking, self-cutting journalist who returns to her provincial hometown to cover a series of mysterious murders, is among the most desolate and disquieting of her career.
“It was a whole other level,” she said, comparing the part to other damaged characters she’s played in the past. But she had been attracted to the novel’s audacious reframing of the female detective archetype. “I like when you can take genre and turn it into its own thing,” she said. “That’s something I’m always interested in — trying to defy expectations.”