It’s difficult to picture now, but Adams was a self-described “mess” for the first several years she lived in L.A. She had been doing dinner theater in Minnesota when she got in her car and drove west, at 24, in 1999. “I was able to do everything from day player to guest star to small parts in movies,” she says, “and it really, to this day, gives me perspective, but going through it was painful, to say the least. I felt a lot of pressure, but I just wasn’t able to get there in the audition room. Or even in meetings. My squirreliness would come out, and people wouldn’t feel confident. I’ve always been someone who had, like, a spirit of perseverance, but I actually almost quit because I was starting not to like who I was.” Suddenly, Adams gets a bite on her line and starts to reel up, but her catch slips free. “My lawyer called me after I was fired from the two shows and said, ‘Just to even get two shows in a pilot season is amazing. So you’re doing something right.’ I thank him all the time for that call.”

The sky has darkened again, and the wind is picking up. As she talks, the boat, which has been pleasantly swaying from side to side, starts rocking dramatically, making it impossible to stand up and move around. “Is it usually this rocky?” says Amy, the quaver back in her voice. “At least the wind is coming offshore,” says Steve. “If it was coming from the other direction, it would be really rough.”

“The boat won’t tip, will it?” asks Amy.

“Uh, what’s that?” says Steve.

“I hope the boat doesn’t tip over!” she shouts into the wind.

“You’re in good hands,” he says. “This is what I do every day.”

What Amy Adams does every day, of course, is run away with every single movie she’s in. She makes even the most mediocre films fun to watch. And she has now reached that rare place for actors where you can’t wait to see what they do next. That is one reason Big Eyes, which opens on Christmas, is one of the most anticipated movies of the year. Directed by Tim Burton, the film is essentially a Margaret Keane biopic, the story of the woman who painted the big-eyed Keane paintings in the fifties and sixties. But the drama is focused on how Margaret’s husband, Walter, came to take credit for her work, marketing her paintings to the world as his own through mass production of prints that were sold in supermarkets and gas stations all over the country. Their relationship is creepy from the start, and the whole charade—the deeply dysfunctional marriage, the big lie at its center—eventually crumbles, with Margaret finally taking Walter to court to get the credit she so richly deserved all along. In a perverse way, it is a late-bloomer feminist’s tale.