Amy Adams is widely known for her striking red hair, which has become a signature part of her on-screen persona in roles like Giselle in Enchanted and Sydney Prosser in American Hustle. But in a surprising twist, Adams has revealed that red is not her natural color.
In an interview with Vogue, Adams explained that her natural hair is more of a strawberry blond. “Like most blonds, the blond has gone kind of ashy, so I assist it with the red,” she said.
Her transformation into a redhead began in 2004 while filming Dr. Vegas. At the time, Adams was cast alongside Sarah Lancaster, a fellow blond with a tanned complexion and green eyes. “Someone’s going to have to change their hair color,” Adams recalled being told. “I looked at her and me, with my pale freckles, and thought, ‘Gee, I wonder which one of us is going to go red!’”
After the switch, the red hair quickly became part of her brand. Adams noticed a shift in how she was perceived in the industry. “It really changed things up,” she said in a Backstage interview. “People began to see me in a different way, for different roles.”
Before her red era, Adams was occasionally seen as a blond. In 2003, she attended Endeavor’s MTV Movie Awards Party with a toffee-blond hairstyle that made her look almost unrecognizable.
During a 2008 appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Adams said the red color suited her both professionally and personally. “I’m a natural blond, but blonds don’t get treated very well in our society, so I enjoy being a redhead much more,” she joked, adding that she noticed a change in how people treated her.
Adams hasn’t stuck to just one shade of red. For American Hustle in 2013, director David O. Russell asked her to go deeper with the color. “He thought it was really powerful, like she just was on fire,” she told Vogue. “He said, ‘I want it to feel like a cape.’”
Later, for Nocturnal Animals in 2016, she adopted a copper tone, with the help of L’Oréal Professionnel artist Nancy Braun. “Amy’s hair is like a sunset — different tones and hues from golden to copper,” Braun told BehindTheChair.com.
Whether golden blond or fiery red, Adams continues to show that she can pull off a wide range of shades — each one adding something new to her on-screen identity.
