Amy Adams at the 'Disenchanted' premiere.

Celebrity

Amy Adams Was Relieved She Didn’t Win an Oscar for ‘Junebug’

Although some actors would be eager to win an Academy Award, a part of Amy Adams wasn’t looking forward to winning an Oscar for one of her earlier roles.

by Antonio Stallings

Published on May 2, 2023

2 min read

The Academy Awards ceremony considered actor Amy Adams a potential candidate for an Oscar ever since her breakthrough role in Junebug. But Adams lost her first opportunity to take home the prize to Rachel Weisz.

It was a loss Adams was more than happy to accept in hindsight.

Why Amy Adams was relieved she didn’t win an Oscar for ‘Junebug’

Adams received her first Oscar nomination for her role as Ashley Johnsten in the 2005 feature Junebug. The film itself was an important milestone for Adams. Even though she wasn’t the lead, Junebug director Phil Morrison asserted that the film might not have been made without her.

“I promise this is true: If we had not found the right person to play Ashley, I would have said, ‘OK, well, let’s just not make the movie,’” Morrison once told The Denver Post. “It’s not that [we] were going to pull the plug. We weren’t even going to put the plug in until we found Amy.”

Adams was more than thankful for the attention her Junebug role was getting, including the Oscar nominations that came with it. But at the time, Adams didn’t even favor herself to win an award.

“I voted for Rachel Weisz,” Adams said.

Weisz would be the one who’d end up walking away with the Best Supporting Actress award that year. And Adams was more than happy to give up her Oscar win for Weisz.

“I wasn’t prepared for the kind of attention that would have brought. And I’m terrified of public speaking,” Adams said.

Adams thought Weisz was going to win that year, anyway. But she did wonder what would’ve happened if she did end up with the award.

“Then at some point during Dolly Parton’s song I turned to my boyfriend [the artist and actor Darren Le Gallo] and said, ‘What if I win?’ I think I’m the only person in Oscar history that looks relieved at the announcement of somebody else’s name,” Adams recalled.

Amy Adams wanted to perform in ballet before she became an actor

Even though Amy Adams didn’t with the Oscar, acting has served Adams well over the years. Before setting out to become a film star, Adams tried her hand at dancing first. This disappointed her parents at the time as Adams was a talented athlete in her high school years. Adams’ parents thought she could’ve used her athletic gifts to obtain a college scholarship. But their daughter had her heart set on being a ballerina.

But soon, Adams felt she wasn’t skilled enough in dancing to make a professional career out of ballet. So instead she danced and acted in dinner- theaters for several years in various places. This would eventually lead to Adams going to Los Angeles on a whim to pursue acting professionally.

“I thought, ‘My body is just wrecked from dancing all these years. Maybe I’ll just go to LA, focus on acting and see what happens,’” she once told The Telegraph.

How many times has Amy Adams been nominated for an Oscar?

Adams has been nominated for an Academy Award six times as of 2023. In addition to Junebug, she received Best Supporting Actor nominations for Doubt, The Fighter, The Master, and Vice. She was nominated for a Best Actress award in 2014 for her starring role in American Hustle.