Adams came by her endearing frugality honestly, as one of seven kids in a working-class Midwestern family. Adams’ father was in the army when she was born and now manages hospital equipment repair. Her mother, after gestating the last Adams heir, went on to become a semiprofessional bodybuilder, “if that tells you anything about her personality,” Adams says with a laugh, and until recently worked at Starbucks. Adams was the middle child (it goes boy, girl, boy, Amy, girl, boy, boy) and spent most of her childhood in the smallish town of Castle Rock, Colorado, where she was raised Mormon (she’s no longer practicing), studied ballet, hated school, and hung out with the theater crowd. Her parents divorced when she was 11, and her father remarried—and no, not to an Enchanted-style evil stepmother, she says, but “it’s always a difficult transition. I will say that.”

After graduation, when she realized she wasn’t gifted enough to make it as a professional ballerina (“I’m too muscley, and I didn’t have great turnout, you know?”), she started doing dinner theater, first in Boulder and then in Minnesota, where she was discovered by scouts casting for 1999’s Drop Dead Gorgeous, the Kirstie Alley/Kirsten Dunst film about a murderous pageant mom, which was being filmed nearby. While Adams had dreamed, in an idle way, of going to New York to try to make it on Broadway, this was the first time she considered Hollywood as a viable career choice. “I just never associated myself with the people I saw on-screen,” she says. “It’s not that I didn’t want to do it; it was just such a leap.”

It was Alley who convinced her it was possible. “I was in a conversation with her, and she said, in her way, ‘You should go. You’re young, you’re funny, you’ll probably get work.’ It sounds so silly,” Adams says, “but it was all I needed to hear.” She flew home to Colorado and met up with her younger brother Eddie; they packed up his car and drove west together. On the way, Eddie’s engine blew out, stranding them in Las Vegas, New Mexico, “the murder capital,” their tow-truck driver told them.

“It was an adventure to us,” she says. “We were just so excited to be breaking the mold and seeing what our futures held for us. It was an exciting time. Scary and thrilling.” When they arrived in Los Angeles in a rented U-Haul, they had to look, on foot, for an apartment and work. They thought about starting a housecleaning service. “Which, if you know me, is absurd,” she says. “I can’t clean anything. I’m so untidy it’s not even funny.” Adams waited tables for two days before scoring a manager—still her manager to this day, the one who gave her the cashmere—who immediately began to send her out on auditions. “I still remember I was wearing the most awful shoes when I met her. They were lime green rubber wedge clogs,” she says. “I thought they were pretty. I wore them for a good year before I realized they weren’t.”