"Amy Adams"

The hosts spend the cold open on Will Arnett's walk of shame — caught at Whole Foods self-checkout in his own SmartLess hoodie, shirtless underneath, mid-sweat — and are deep into a debate about bathroom etiquette in marriages when Amy Adams joins, entirely unbothered. Sean Hayes gets straight to Arrival, and Adams explains the strange craft problem at its heart: she first read the script assuming a traditional timeline, and on screen had to play scenes so they read as flashbacks on a first viewing and flash-forwards on a rewatch.

The biography that follows is more unusual than the filmography suggests. Adams was born on a US Army base near Vicenza, Italy, and grew up in Colorado watching her father — an Army man who played bars as a one-man band, working a foot synthesizer in fancy socks. She was a musical-theater and ballet kid with paralyzing stage fright who never went to drama school; she credits sitting through the Doubt rehearsals with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman as her real actor training, plus a later acting coach who taught her to scale down for camera. Her first paid job was an Omaha bank commercial lip-syncing 'Summer Loving' rewritten as 'Summer Banking'; then came guest spots on Charmed, Buffy, That '70s Show and The West Wing. The turning point was getting cut down to recurring on Dr. Vegas the same week she was shooting Junebug — and Enchanted, the one script she read knowing the part was hers, is what finally made her feel secure.

A long detour reveals both guest and host are the people who run toward emergencies: Hayes once stripped off his shirt to apply pressure to a stranger's bullet wound on the way home from a Will & Grace taping, and Adams and her father used beach towels to stanch a stabbing victim's neck wound outside a Santa Monica restaurant — a man who found her in a restaurant a year later to thank her. She also confirms she has wrapped a part in the new Shawn Levy Star Wars film with Ryan Gosling, where visiting the creature shop with her daughter reduced her to a fangirl who 'forgot how to act,' and she previews Cape Fear for Apple TV+ with Javier Bardem and Patrick Wilson — with whom she harmonized on Indigo Girls deep cuts between setups.