SINCE THEN THERE have been juicier roles and steady acclaim and, of course, more Oscar nominations. In 2015, Adams married her longtime boyfriend, Darren Le Gallo, an artist she met in acting class, with whom she has a daughter, Aviana, named after Aviano, the Italian city where Adams, a military brat, was born. (Adams is one of seven children in a family that was Mormon until her parents’ divorce.) Having Aviana led Adams to again rethink her relationship to work. “I had to learn how to shut the door when I walk off the set. It’s hard and it doesn’t always work, but more often than not it does now,” she says. Long hours and location shoots can be tough on families, but having a husband who is willing to pack up with Adams helps. “We’ve realized we can be happy in an apartment in Detroit or a house in Hollywood or a hotel room,” she said. “It’s a good feeling, but I’m protective of it — very protective.”

It can be tricky shutting that door on a project like “Sharp Objects,” where she plays a reporter chasing a grisly story and where, for the first time, she has an executive producer credit. “What was exciting for me was being part of the creative development,” Adams said, “getting to feel comfortable speaking, feeling like that was my role now. Like, oh wait, I have an opinion and I’m going to share it!” She enjoyed it, but is unsure how much more producing she wants to do. “I can multitask,” she said, “it’s just an intense experience. And especially when you’re working every day of production, all day every day, in a dark character, and then trying to manage the other stuff — for me it was challenging.”

Those challenges extended to the set, including one day when, for a tricky single take, she had to crawl on a bathroom floor while weeping and drinking fake vomit she then had to spit up. As she was crawling and weeping and vomiting, a male crew member kept whispering the location of a prop until she finally barked, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” She apologized, explaining that she’d been staying in character. “He was trying to be helpful,” she told me. It’s the kind of response that I’d expected from Adams — but I had misunderstood her. I thought she was illustrating how she had gone to a psychologically dark place, but the point was that she knew she was right to call this man out. “I feel partially responsible for the tone that’s on set,” Adams said. “I’m sorry for how he felt, but I knew why I was doing that.”