Baby-voiced Joey Lauren Adams has learned that money talks

By JIM SLOTEK — Toronto Sun

HOLLYWOOD — It was one of life’s lessons for Joey Lauren Adams. You can get all the indie credibility in the world, but only money talks.

Adams — who’s the love interest in the Adam Sandler summer hit Big Daddy — had her face plastered all over the movie mags for her starring role in Chasing Amy, in which she played a cute, baby-voiced lesbian, falling in and out of love with a besotted guy (Ben Affleck).

The baby-voiced Adams fell in love with the director, Kevin Smith (a relationship that eventually ended), but that was all she got out of the movie when the applause died down.

‘ANYTHING I WANT’ “I thought after Chasing Amy, I would be able to do anything I want, which definitely wasn’t the case,” the 31-year-old actress says. “This small script came to me with James Garner attached, called Tuesday’s Letter. I really wanted to do it, but we all tried and couldn’t get it financed. I mean, I’d been nominated for a Golden Globe! Why couldn’t I get this movie?”

Then she foolishly took the best script available, rather than the most commercial. That would be A Cool Dry Place, an intelligent drama shot in Toronto for director John N. Smith (during which she and co-star Vince Vaughn became an item). There’ve been more Sasquatch sightings than reports of the film on theatre marquees. It now sits on video shelves.

“So I realized I had to do a film that makes money to do the projects that I want.” Which is a diplomatic way of saying she realizes there’ll be no Oscar noms for Big Daddy (in which Sandler plays an irresponsible bachelor who’s left to care for a five-year-old kid), and that, frankly, the female characters in a boys movie like this are not exactly deeply drawn.

But here’s what we want to know from Adams, who plays a goal-oriented, workaholic lawyer whose heart is melted by this big baboon. Why would an ambitious professional woman get caught up in a relationship with a case of arrested development of the sort Sandler plays?

Adams laughs. “My therapist says it happens all the time!” Therapist? “I started going about a year and a half ago, just when I have a crisis. I just started dealing with a lot of father issues this year (her father was a lumberyard owner in Arkansas), and dealing with the effect your upbringing has on you. I’ve started looking at my relationship with my father in a very honest way, and realizing how it affects the way I am with men. And you just kind of sit there and go, ‘Duh! Why didn’t I see this before? My father didn’t talk to me, so I feel men don’t understand me!’ ”

In fact, it’s been one long voyage of self-discovery for Adams since she left Arkansas at age 19, first to attend college in San Diego, and then to follow her star in L.A.

“My first job in L.A., I was hired as a backup singer for a county-western singer named Troy Cory, and we toured China. Well, we were supposed to tour China but we were kicked out. We were in Shanghai, and he would take uppers and then downers and sing the same verse over and over, and they’re very strict over there about that stuff. Tie A Yellow Ribbon was a show-stopper, and other than that they didn’t know any Western music except for Wham! It was just a nightmare. We’d have our little dances choreographed and Troy Cory would come up and try to rub against us onstage.”

‘NOT A NORMAL VOICE’ Up next? “I don’t know. I read one script I really, really, really like, but I think my voice might be a problem. The director doesn’t like it. I can talk a little deeper, but it doesn’t sound like me.

“It’s not a normal voice. It doesn’t fit into people’s preconceptions about what a woman’s voice should sound like. My mom doesn’t think I have an unusual voice, though. I’m sure it’s helped me get some roles. But Chasing Amy, I almost didn’t get. There was concern the voice would grate on some people — which some critics said it did.”