She’s spoken of quite fondly

Actress Amy Adams was watching television recently with her mother when a behind-the-scenes feature on her new movie “Catch Me if You Can” came on.

It was strange enough to see herself on the TV, but stranger still was seeing both Leonardo DiCaprio and Steven Spielberg, her respective co-star and director, talk about her.

“They had spoken to me, of course, I knew they knew me,” she says, wide-eyed. “But I’d never heard them talk of me. At some point they both sat down and said my name several times. And spoke fondly, no less. It was pretty bizarre.”

The fourth of seven siblings (her younger brother Eddie had a small role in the latest “Austin Powers” film), the pert Colorado native skipped college in favor of the regional theater circuit.

It was while in a musical production in Minnesota that she was cast alongside rising starlets Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards and Brittany Murphy in the 1999 beauty pageant spoof “Drop Dead Gorgeous.”

A few words of encouragement from co-star Kirstie Alley were all Adams needed to pack her bags for Hollywood.

Less than a month after arriving out West, Adams was cast in “Manchester Prep,” a television spinoff of the hit film “Cruel Intentions.”

The show never aired (it is now available on video as “Cruel Intentions 2”), but it provided a springboard to a handful of television guest spots and roles in such films as “Pumpkin” and “Serving Sara.”

When Adams was called in to audition for Spielberg for the role of Brenda Strong in “Catch Me,” she had already tried out for the same role when a different director had been attached to the project. “Once you’ve done an audition you always think, ‘Gee, if I could only do that again.’ To get the chance to do it over was like a dream come true.”

Though Brenda Strong is the name of one paramour in Frank Abagnale Jr.’s memoir of life as a con man on which the film is based, Adams’ character in the script is a composite of women he was involved with. Adams’ first scene in the film, in which DiCaprio flatters and flirts with her gawky hospital candy-striper, is aided in no small measure by the prosthetic braces she wears on her teeth to great effect.

Adams, perhaps due to simple press fatigue, is surprisingly blase about the fact that a good portion of her screen time is spent canoodling with DiCaprio, one of the world’s leading heartthrobs. “I’d had a huge talent crush on him,” she says. “But I wasn’t counting script pages to see how many times I’d kiss him. I really didn’t think about it, since something like that has to come from a genuine place for the character. I couldn’t worry about Amy’s selfish ambition to be making out with Leo.”

She gets one of the biggest laughs in the film with her shocked response to finding out her fiance is not what he seems. Adams credits Spielberg with honing her timing in the scene and notes that her character is not intended come across as the sharpest tool in the shed.

“You have to be honest about who people are,” she adds. “But you never want to actually think of your character as dumb because dumb people always think they’re the smartest people ever. That’s partly why they are so dumb.”

Of her short stint working for the Hooters restaurant chain, she says, “I just really needed to buy a car. I was so sick of taking the bus. And I’m sure there are worse things for people to find out about than working at Hooters.”

Since finishing work on “Catch Me,” Adams filmed a guest spot on “The West Wing” and is now mulling over a handful of offers.

“I try to leave words like ‘capitalize’ and ‘heat’ to my business people and I just try to consider the material on its own,” she says. “You have to be very clear about what road you want to go down or someone else will decide for you. That can be hard when you’re a young woman in Hollywood. There’s so much going on around you that it’s hard to stay focused on what’s actually important to you.”