Amy Adams long road to success

Amy Adams was talking recently about her years of struggling before her success in films. She was working for 12 years before her breakthrough role in Junebug.

Here, she talks about those years and how she wouldn’t never replace them.

“Yes, I get to do a lot of really fantastic things at this point in my life,” she says by phone from Los Angeles. “But there were a lot of years where it didn’t look quite so glamorous — very recently.”

Years that made her newest role, as a struggling single mom who starts a crime-scene cleanup business in “Sunshine Cleaning,” not altogether foreign.

It’s important here to note that Adams, 34, spent almost a dozen years trying to make it as an actress when “Junebug” finally came along. That she took a job at Hooters to pay the rent and worked in dinner theaters in Colorado and Minnesota for six years before mustering the courage to move to Hollywood.

“I definitely had to struggle to make ends meet,” she says. “But I think I was always okay with the struggle. I really enjoyed what I did.”

“I think at this point I can safely say, ‘Yeah, I’m very glad for those years.’ It really helped inform who I am,” she says. “It helps you keep it in perspective.”

But, she adds: “If you’d asked me then, I would’ve said, ‘No. I’d rather just have it easier.’ ”

But Adams considers herself lucky to have had time to develop real friendships before fame struck. She met her fiance, Darren Le Gallo, in acting class and has been with him for more than six years. “I don’t have as much time to spend on myself and my friendships as I would hope,” she says. “But I’m really fortunate that I have a really great support system, and it’s been there for a while.”

Here’s the whole shabang