Jane Adams has secured a corner table at her favorite breakfast spot in Brentwood, and is patiently waiting. I’m a few minutes late for our interview; while walking over, I rehearse in my head how I can most insouciantly mention The Idol—the biggest TV show that this iconic indie actor has ever been a major part of; the worst-reviewed project of her career; the Cannes premiere still facing backlash over everything from its explicit sexual content to reports of behind-the-scenes tension. But after some chitchat, Adams dives right in without hesitation. “I love the show,” she says with an energized smile. “These days, to certain people, you almost have to apologize when you dislike something or you love something.” She is not apologizing today: “I don’t really care anymore. That is one good thing about being a gray-haired lady—it’s almost like you get a license to not care.”

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This proves very true. As that aforementioned gray hair rests on her green jean jacket, the 58-year-old Adams sits with some initial nerves—she texted her friend, the actor Poppy Montgomery, admitting as much while waiting for me—before settling in comfortably and with great intention. “I feel like it’s important for me to say it—that’s what old ladies are for, to go, ‘Hey, I’ve been around a little bit. This is no fun. It used to be fun.’” Understandably, she’s tapped into the discourse around The Idol. She believes that she and her costars, including Lily-Rose Depp and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, have clearly communicated that The Idol set was safe, enjoyable, exciting, and creatively fulfilling. (Indeed, they have.) “What is amazing to me is no one’s listening—I’ve not seen that before in all my days, such a dogged ‘We refuse to change the narrative,’” Adams says. “I especially want to say to all the feminists, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ All these women that I’m working with are talking about their experience and you’re not listening. You’re not listening!”

Adams is in an unusual spot here. For all of the negative coverage of The Idol, which was directed and cowritten by Euphoria’s Sam Levinson, critics have universally praised her turn as Nikki Katz, the no-bullshit and smoothly soulless record-label executive who treats the emotional breakdown of her pop-star client Jocelyn (Depp) as little more than a financial hiccup. Adams, a Tony winner and Emmy nominee who tends to operate on the fringe, has felt the love but wants it to spread. “To the people who love my performance—I can’t do that by myself,” she says. “That’s Sam. The environment that he creates, the direction he gives me, is so good.” The five-episode drama, which concluded Sunday—yes, we’ll get into that finale; consider this your spoiler warning—offered Adams a unique mix of scripted and improvisatory scene work, and surrounded her with similarly textured acting from Randolph, Hank Azaria, Dan Levy, and more who portray members of Jocelyn’s team.

This is meant to be a career-spanning conversation, and we manage it over nearly two hours, but between bites of her bacon and eggs, Adams often steers back to The Idol. To her, the show represents the kind of art she wants to make, while all the noise around it affirms her greatest fears about where the culture is headed. “Free speech is the license to offend, period, full stop,” she says. “The funniest stuff, to me, is going to offend a group of people no matter what you do.” She is not wrong to draw on The Idol so consistently in this profile. In many ways, for this singular actor, it feels like a culmination point.

Adams was born in Washington, DC, before moving to Wheaton, Illinois, at two years old. Her mother had been in the CIA—“still to this day, I’m not quite sure what the extent of it was”—and her father worked as a naval officer and engineer. She found the Midwest stifling; a life of acting promised a way out. “I would look at record album covers and I would look at photographs of people in Rolling Stone, and they all just looked very counterculture, very high, very smart and funny,” she says. “I was like, ‘I want to party with those people.’” It turned out Adams was not just motivated, but talented. By 25, she was a Juilliard graduate bound to make her Broadway debut. By 30, she had starred in three Broadway productions and won a Tony Award. Paul Rudnick once called her “one of those magnificent waifs who can make fragility seem magical and demented at the same time.”

Early on, she realized staying in the business required thick skin. Her first big stage opportunity, originating the role of Deirdre McDavey in Rudnick’s 1991 play, I Hate Hamlet, became front-page fodder when her costars Nicol Williamson and Evan Handler collided onstage. More specifically, according to The New York Times, the notorious Williamson smacked Handler with a sword prop mid-scene, which led Handler to exit the stage and quit the production. Adams claims she made the impending Tony nominations list, but that her name was removed by the committee after the scandal. (Representatives for the Tony Awards did not respond to a request for comment.) “I was like, ‘I will stay in New York until I win one of those goddamn things,’” she says with a laugh. “I’m not saying that’s rational thinking—I’m telling you that to make you laugh—but it actually is true.” (She won the goddamn thing in 1994, for An Inspector Calls.)

After her Tony triumph, Adams moved to Los Angeles. She noticed the Broadway roles she wanted increasingly going to film and TV stars, and felt ready to try the Hollywood thing anyway. She moved into a condo in Marina del Rey where she was once told, “Jane, I don’t think there’s anyone else in a 12-mile radius listening to Patti Smith right now.” Yes, this was a far cry from ’90s NYC. But as in New York, she found work fast. She landed the well-received, short-lived TV series Relativity (created by Jason Katims and costarring Poppy Montgomery), which in turn led to a lead role in Happiness. Here we reach breakthrough number two, and setback number two. The 1998 Todd Solondz black comedy frankly depicted pedophilia, suicide, and several other discomfiting topics. The initial distributor, October Films—then known for Oscar-nominated hits like Secrets & Lies and Breaking the Waves—abandoned the movie, reportedly over its parent company Seagram’s moral objections. The producer, Good Machine, released the film on its own in a far more limited capacity than planned. Critics praised the movie, various awards were won, but its life was not what it should have been.

This goes especially for Adams, whose brilliantly brittle performance felt like the beginning of a major film career. “At 32, I became very aware of, ‘Wow, you can’t count on anything,’” she says. She remembers her invite to Cannes being rescinded because, with the loss of October Films, the production couldn’t afford to take anyone other than Solondz. “Imagine that phone call—it was like, ‘You’re done. It’s not happening,’” Adams says. If fame didn’t come through, though, a reputation for making brave and unexpected choices did. Happiness represents the Adams I meet rather perfectly. The film is offensive and smart, curious and darkly funny. “You couldn’t even make that movie today,” Adams says. “[There were] lines around the block in New York when it was still in theaters, and the whole town talked about it. But that was when the liberal press celebrated things that upset people.”

What’s changed, in her mind? “Over the last few years, it’s been a weird experience that makes me a little sad,” she says between sips of her hot matcha latte. “People in that world, some of them, have turned into the scolding schoolmarms that I wanted to be an actress to get away from.”

The experience of a character actor can come down to how you get recognized in public. For Adams, it started with a few weird Happiness interactions: “More people than you would think would stop me and say, ‘Oh, my God, I was on my first date with my now husband for that movie and you ruined it—that was just the strangest way to start our relationship.’” She recurred on Frasier the next year, at which point people would scream her character’s name on the street as she walked by.

Her TV career has never been high-profile—either the show was too niche, or her part too small—but she’s flourished on the small screen, playing witty and strange women who find unique ways of asserting their power. Adams owned the unsung 2010s HBO comedy series Hung as the unlikely pimp to a one-night stand (played by Thomas Jane), her performance a marvelous amalgamation of sad, sweet, and scary. In 2017, The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote of Adams’s turn in TNT’s Claws, “[She’s] played a lot of wacky characters, but they are giving her some truly luscious banana bread.” (Adams played an artist holding a man captive as a sex slave.) But only two years ago did Adams receive her first Emmy nod, for guest starring as Hannah Einbinder’s neurotic mother in Max’s Hacks.

At one point, I bring up another show Adams doesn’t hear about much, the one-and-done CBS series Citizen Baines, an otherwise mediocre family drama about a former US senator (James Cromwell) that Adams elevated as his prickly daughter. Moments later, Adams’s sister in that 2001 show, Embeth Davidtz, rushes up to us at the restaurant. “I’m the only person who hasn’t seen your show yet!” Davidtz says as she greets her old friend. Adams explains she’s being interviewed for said show, The Idol, and that, weirdly, we were just discussing Citizen Baines. “We only survived because of each other,” Davidtz tells me carefully. “You would know this already, about generic TV writing, but [Jane] could take the most unimaginative line and make it sound”—she turns to Adams—“I don’t know how you do it.” She starts to walk to a nearby table. “I have to see you,” Davidtz tells Adams as a wistful farewell, “just to get an injection of creativity and life.”

Ah—is that what this is? There’s a liveness to Adams’s way of conversing. She keeps you on your toes and likes to provoke, though it never feels combative. “Thanks for asking questions—it’s a relief that that is what you have to do,” she tells me at one point. “Have I made it clear I’m very happy that you’re in charge?” She appreciates this kind of structure, in her desire to talk about the tough stuff, the controversies floating in the air because of The Idol. As Adams sees it, gossip around the production has filtered into criticism of the series itself; she hears many refusing to engage with The Idol’s satirical commentary on celebrity and modern life, or its forthrightness with sex and nudity. “I think it’s gorgeous stylistically, but it’s a black comedy,” she says. “It’s a kaleidoscope that they’ve created. They’re inviting the audience: ‘Look here. Instead of the other things you’ve been looking for, try these kaleidoscope glasses on.’ It’s trippy.”

Viewers have not taken the invitation. The show has been bashed, even mocked, as indulgent and flat, with critics finding alignment between behind-the-scenes rumors and the salacious content that’s made it to the screen. I take Adams’s points, and agree with many of her specifics, even if we’re not always on the same page—a dynamic with which she’s comfortable. “What’s that like?” she asks when I tell her I was born in the ’90s. “Do you want people’s language to be policed?” In another instance, she asks if I disagree with her points about politically incorrect art, and I say I mostly don’t, and she presses, “But you kind of do.” It’s probably a generational thing, I reason.

Adams talks a whole lot about what she’s hearing and seeing, and why it dismays her, but insists the greater concern has to do with the way it spills into the work. In The Idol, her character is unfiltered and insensitive—and very well-drawn. Adams recalls one scene where she, in character, improvised an inflammatory line of dialogue. “I remember a certain PA just looking not happy, and I needed to get a cue from them—we’re working, and I’m going to notice if somebody seems like something’s wrong,” Adams says. “So I said, ‘Are you alright?’” Adams says the assistant “kind of stuttered: ‘Well, I find that language upsetting.’” This is at the heart of what troubles Adams about being an actor right now. “We’re not going to be able to find funny stuff unless we can say whatever,” she says. “People are self-censoring. I can only speak from what I’ve observed and then speak for myself. I definitely am upset that I have to self-censor.”

One of Adams’s best film performances debuted a few years ago in the brazen She Dies Tomorrow, which was directed by Amy Seimetz. Talk about fearless: The ever-bold Seimetz would seem a natural collaborator with Adams, and they became good friends. Seimetz actually cast Adams in The Idol back when she was director and executive producer on the project; deep into production, Seimetz then exited over “creative differences” with Levinson and cocreator-star Abel Tesfaye. Rolling Stone’s report of on-set dysfunction alleged that Levinson’s version turned The Idol into “sexual torture porn,” while scrapping Seimetz’s relatively female-focused vision. (Adams, it’s safe to say, refutes Rolling Stone’s depiction of the set.)

“Creative differences happen. That’s all I can say,” Adams tells me of Seimetz’s departure. “Amy and I are still friends, and we will absolutely work together in the future. It’s just—changes were made.”

The Idol finale turned the tables by revealing Jocelyn in full control of herself, and her mysterious new love interest, Tedros (Tesfaye), as more muse than dangerous cult leader. The episode laughs at the notion that she could have been a victim in this dynamic, surrounded as she is by such powerful forces, and seems to wink at those who viewed the series accordingly. Even Adams’s Nikki and the rest of Jocelyn’s team are taken aback by the way, live onstage, the pop star reclaims Tedros for herself. “I felt there were so many moments that were a surprise, in a good way…. Everybody judges things right away, and didn’t trust that [Sam] is a storyteller,” Adams says in a follow-up call after Sunday’s finale aired. “The best kind of stories start out with characters one way, and then they [become] completely different.” 

Adams watched the episode at Levinson’s home with the cast and crew. She loves the episode, the same way she feels about the series as a whole, and is hopeful about a second season. “To spend months with these people was just a joy,” she says. They all expected a mixed reaction going into Cannes, where the series first premiered to negative reviews. “The low Rotten Tomatoes score of The Idol is another laugh—it’s like, ‘Okay, whatever, guys,’” Adams says. “People don’t have to love it. I just find it oppressive—the kind of, ‘Well, you shouldn’t like it because….’”

It’s a reaction Adams has spent much of her time as a professional fighting against. Things have not always gone her way. The irony, maybe, is that she’s at her most beloved with audiences right now. “It’s nice, yeah,” she says of this moment in her career. She wonders at one point, aloud, if she sounds out of touch. I tell her she does not; on the contrary, she appears, if not always in line with consensus, hyperaware of it. “Thank you,” she says. “That’s always a concern.”

Before I move to another question, she interrupts: “Only if you promise to tell me if my lips are green from the matcha.” They are not. “Okay, good,” she says again. Then we talk for awhile longer—a conversation that can turn windy and sticky, that’s not always comfortable, but that reveals an artist in her prime and willing to go out on a limb. An injection, surely, of life and creativity.