Amy Adams Gets Candid About the Traumatic Moment She Helped Save a Stabbing Victim

Amy Adams is truly a hero.

During an appearance on the “Smartless” podcast on June 22, 2026, while promoting her new role in AppleTV’s “Cape Fear,” Adams recalled the time when she and her father saved the life of a man who had been stabbed in the neck.

The actress was out with her father, her husband, and her daughter when the incident occurred.

“We were in Santa Monica, coming out of our favorite restaurant … These people were screaming and a guy was walking and they were yelling, ‘He’s dying!’ And my husband’s like, ‘That’s blood!’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Darren, you stay here with our daughter.’ [My dad and I] ran over and he’d been stabbed in the neck. So he was bleeding and his friends were freaking out.”

Adams said she and her father applied pressure on his neck wound with beach towels.

“I’m sitting there somehow going, ‘You need to calm your pulse rate. Take a deep breath in,’” she said. “I literally was just so focused. I was like, ‘The more you struggle, the faster you’re going to bleed. Just lay down. Let’s elevate this.’”

The man ultimately survived and Adams revealed she ran into him a year later.

A guy walks up to me in the restaurant. He’s like, ‘I heard a story that you and your dad were on the scene of a guy getting stabbed.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s so funny you heard that story,'” she explained. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s you!’ And it was him. And he was, like, all teary, and he had his son with him. Yeah. It was so crazy.”

Adams credited her ability to stay calm and help the wounded man from her role on the 2004 medical TV series Dr. Vegas.