In Denis Villeneuve’s latest big-budget thriller, Arrival, Amy Adams stars as Dr. Louise Banks, a genius linguist recruited by the U.S. military to understand the language of alien visitors who have set up camp in Montana, as well as 11 other locations around the planet.
She works alongside a team played by Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker as they rush to discover the purpose of the alien invaders. But the more they uncover, the more they realize that the real threat may not be coming from the mysterious visitors but rather from the human race itself.
“She didn’t feel strange to me. She felt like every woman I know who’s struggling with hard things, who’s working through personal issues while also heading out into the world and handling life and work,” said Adams. “It’s a constant balance. It’s a constant juggling act.”
For Renner, the appeal was playing a role completely apart from his previous body of work. “It was a departure from a lot of things I’ve done,” he said. “Playing a mathematician and a physicist is a bit far from an archer,” he joked, referring to his role as Hawkeye in the Avengers films. “So I thought there’s a pretty great challenge in that.”
He also was drawn to the film for its hopefulness. “When humanity is at its worst, it [can] find itself with compassion. I think that’s displayed a bit in this film. When there’s a unity in that division, there’s something quite powerful in that, if we could all accept the fact that we’re one.”
