The star of Arrival and Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals – both premiering at the London Film Festival – talks difficult directors, the Hollywood pay gap and punching Bradley Cooper

Amy Adams has not had a busy morning. We meet at midday at the Chateau Marmont, just off LA’s Sunset Strip, and she is, she says, having “a laid-back mommy day”. So far this has consisted of taking her daughter to school – it’s January, so they’ve just started back – followed by a work-out, a shower, and now this. Afterwards, she’ll go shopping at Target to pick up some washing powder (“People always say to me: ‘You do your own shopping?’”), before picking up her daughter, who’s five, from school, and then back to their Beverly Hills home with her husband for dinner. It is, she says, leaning back, “a real easy day”.

The day, it becomes clear, is indicative of a direction. Not a left-turn into idleness exactly, but a re-evaluation of a post-thirties headlong rush that saw her, after a breakout role in 2005 indie hit Junebug at the relatively late age of 30, go from comedy sidekick (a stint in The Office, a bit-part in Talladega Nights) to leading roles as wide-eyed ingénues (Enchanted, The Muppets), to acting opposite Meryl Streep, twice (Doubt, Julie & Julia), to working for some of the world’s most acclaimed directors, from Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master) to Spike Jonze (Her) to David O Russell (The Fighter, American Hustle). In an eight-year spell she was nominated for five Oscars and six Golden Globes, winning two of the latter.

For many, they’d just be getting started; revving up, say, for that elusive Oscar win. Sixth time lucky!

For Adams: not so much.

Part of the reason, she says, is her daughter, and the time she hasn’t been able to spend with her. “I made my career a really big priority when I was younger and I don’t regret the work that I did, but I really regret the time that I missed. So maybe I don’t do four films a year now. Maybe I can take a step back. I still want to work, but it’s got to make sense. For the next four or five years, the choices I make are going to have a lot to do with how it fits into life, you know? And it’s gonna have to be OK.”

For now, this simply means the 41-year-old taking on some more minor roles, or ones with more green screen (so they shoot close to home), or just generally roles that don’t demand quite so much of her time.

This month, for instance, she’s reprising her supporting role as Lois Lane in the second instalment of the rebooted Superman franchise, titled Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, which sees Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill battling it out for the thing all superheroes must strive for: a money-spinning sequel with yet more superheroes (a Justice League film, where they team up like the Avengers, is expected). Next up, Arrival (green screen: “I spent so much time talking to a screen! It’s actually a very small film. It’s about aliens who are trying to communicate with us. I’m the linguist they bring in”) and then Tom Ford’s follow-up to A Single Man, called Nocturnal Animals, which co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Armie Hammer and which she shot in three weeks.

She recently watched the new Star Wars, and is slightly obsessed (“I say, ‘May the force be with you,’ to my daughter before she goes to school and she’s like, ‘I’m not Rey, Mom!’”), so would certainly be interested in a bit-part. “Yup! We’d figure it out! I’ll play a creature. I don’t care. Put the dots on my face and I’ll crawl around!” A Wookiee even? “I think more an Ewok, considering my stature.” And she wouldn’t rule out being a Bond girl either, but worries you can’t be a woman of mystery as a redhead. “I mean, I’d love to be a Bond girl. But it would depend. I don’t see myself like Eva Green, she’s so gorgeous and mysterious. I don’t see myself like that.” And then, well, she’ll see. Despite being one of the most lauded actors of the past decade, she worries this self-enforced semi-sabbatical might hurt her career. But, she adds, “It’s gonna have to be worth the risk.”