Amy Ryan News

Amy Ryan is our choice for this year's Best Supporting Actress. She stole every scene in Gone Baby Gone.

The actress recently talked with TV Guide about the movie, the upcoming Academy Awards and more...

TVGuide.com: You've already won a number of prestigious critics' awards for Gone Baby Gone. How has the Oscar nomination changed your life?
Amy Ryan: Well, it's kept me busier than I've ever been, but I'm still coming to terms with it. It's still kind of surreal and wonderful. Sometimes it's even hard to believe it's true, yet it's familiar, because you've dreamt it for so long. The attention the movie and I have been getting has opened doors to new material and [the opportunity] to work with these great actors and directors, and that is the biggest prize of all.

TVGuide.com: How did you get the role of Helene?
Ryan: I live in New York, but I was in Los Angeles at the time [of the audition]. When I saw the appointment sheet and it said director Ben Affleck, I was thinking, 'You mean, actor Ben Affleck? He's playing Patrick?' But he's a force when you meet him. He's so well-spoken. He's the brightest man in the room.

I was so thrilled from the get-go, like, 'Oh, this is gonna be good. I hope I get this.' He was so passionate about wanting to tell this story, and that's always infectious, to be around either someone who knows what they're doing or is eager to learn. [Laughs] So he had a combination of both.

Read the full interview now.

Amy Ryan - who is receiving Oscar consideration for her role in Gone Baby Gone - will star alongside Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon in a Paul Greengrass-directed untitled Iraq War thriller for Universal Pictures.

Based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's nonfiction book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," this fictional thriller will be set in the fortified Iraqi ''Green Zone,'' where U.S. troops stay during the Iraq occupation.

Ryan will play a New York Times foreign correspondent sent to Iraq to investigate the U.S. government's claims of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, Damon portrays an officer who teams with a senior CIA officer to search for said weapons, while Kinnear plays another CIA officer.

Will this war movie have better success that other recent efforts, such as Lions for Lambs and Rendition?

Next up, Ryan stars in the Clint Eastwood-directed feature The Changeling.

Amy Ryan might very well hear her named call during the Academy Awards.  Her performance in Gone Baby Gone is generation serious Oscar talk.

For now, though, the actress is simply talking to Entertainment Weekly about her career:

Entertainment Weekly: How has your life changed since Gone Baby Gone opened?
Amy Ryan: It's gotten busier, and I've run out of adjectives. Even my mother is complaining that she has no more adjectives. She sent me an e-mail this morning and she just wrote ''Woo-hoo!'' [Laughs] And then on the practical side, I'm starting to get invites to the bigger table at Thanksgiving. I don't have to sit at the folding card table anymore, with the leg between my knees! [Laughs] That's the best part of it, that there's access to better material, directors, and actors.

EW: So you're already receiving better scripts?
Ryan: Oh yeah, for sure. Being an actor, we're so dependent on the writers. That's why I'm like, God, I hope the strike ends. My big break during the writers' strike! Oh, crap.

EW: What do you make of the Oscar buzz?
Ryan: I have to keep scratching my ass. You know when people say ''Knock on wood''? I met this woman who said, ''Scratch your ass,'' which is what my grandmother said. It made me laugh so hard that I've been scratching my ass for, like, a month. I did some interview online, and I found myself very subtly reaching around. I think I'm caught on tape somewhere, scratching my ass.

EW: Your next movie is The Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood. Between him and your Before the Devil Knows You're Dead director Sidney Lumet, you'll have worked with two masters.
Ryan: It's great. I'm really lucky. Clint works very similarly to Sidney Lumet in, like, be very prepared because you're only going to get two takes. Both have, I think, very rich personal lives they want to get home to. I met Clint for the first time on set.

You audition on videotape, so we were getting ready to do the scene and the first thing he said to me was, ''I read you worked with Sidney Lumet.'' I said, ''Yeah.'' He said, ''So you're used to doing two takes. Good.'' [Laughs] Half-compliment, half-threat.

EW: Who do you play in The Changeling?
Ryan: I befriend [a character played by] Angelina Jolie. Both characters end up in really dire situations. And I kind of teach her how to survive. I help her through her darkest hour because I've been there a little longer than she has. But if I tell you where, it gives away a plot point.

Read the full interview with Ryan now.