Amy Adams is an actress so bubbly and bright that she made the perfect Disney princess come to life in 2007's Enchanted. But for every chipper movie venture, Adams is careful to create a dramatic ballast, securing her reputation by diving into darker roles in sterner movies, like Doubt and The Fighter, both of which earned her Oscar nods. So to follow up her celebrated but lighthearted performance in the musical comedy The Muppets, Adams needs a moodier movie to remind us all once more that she's so much more than a spirited ingénue with a dazzling smile.
She's already wrapped on Paul Thomas Anderson's upcoming period piece The Master, but with Man of Steel slated for summer of 2013, Adams may well be in need of another gritty drama to stay true to form after playing Lois Lane. Perhaps Gilles Paquet-Brenner's adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel Dark Places could be Adams' next palette-cleansing project.
Deadline reports that Adams has entered into negotiations to star as Libby Day, a woman plagued by the violence she witnessed as a child. Twenty-five years after testifying that her brother slaughtered their mother and sisters, her account is called into question by a bizarre batch of hobbyists called The Kill Club, who independently investigate curious crimes for their own macabre amusement. Revisiting the figures and places of her perilous past, Libby discovers the dark truth behind the night her mother died.
Paquet-Brenner, who wrote and directed the high-grossing Kristin Scott Thomas drama Sarah's Key, has penned the adaptation and is set to helm. There's no shoot date announced for Dark Places, but with Adams currently in production on Spike Jonze's untitled comedy, and set to take to the stage of the Delacorte Theater in New York City's Central Park as the Baker's Wife in Into the Woods this summer, it seems this thriller will have to wait until fall if the filmmaker wants the multi-talented actress on board.
