Over the course of its 10-year run on TV, Smallville served as a proving ground for several up-and-coming actors, including Amy Adams, who appeared in Smallville’s very first season. Famous faces that feel ubiquitous nowadays, such as Lizzy Caplan, Cobie Smulders, and Evangeline Lilly, landed some of their earliest roles on Smallville, which chronicled Clark Kent’s early life in the little Kansas town before he became Superman.
Smallville remains one of the longest-running and most popular superhero TV series in the United States, spanning 10 years and delivering more than 200 episodes of story dedicated to DC Comics’ flagship hero, Superman. The series effectively launched the careers of stars Tom Welling, Kristin Kreuk, Michael Rosenbaum, and Allison Mack as it followed Clark (Welling) from his high school years in Smallville to his early 20s. And there were quite a few people who joined the main cast on their journey. One of those people was Amy Adams.
Amy Adams has been nominated for six Academy Awards, but before she became a big screen star, she appeared in Smallville season 1, along with a handful of other TV shows from the 1990s and 2000s. Adams appeared in season 1, episode 7, “Craving”, as Jodi, one of Clarke, Chloe, and Pete’s friends who struggled with being overweight. Adams landed the Smallville gig with just two years of acting professionally under her belt and following one of the most prolific years in her career thus far, which saw her appear for an episode on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, That ’70s Show, and in Cruel Intentions 2, her third feature-length film role. Adams only appeared on Smallville once but it was a role that certainly left an impression.
At the start of “Craving,” Jodi is bullied for her weight and struggles with not feeling as beautiful or acceptable as other girls her age. So, in an effort to try and lose weight fast before Lana Lang’s birthday party, Jodi opted to crash-diet by only drinking green juice made from the vegetables grown in her father’s greenhouse. The problem, of course, was that the vegetables were grown with the help green Kryptonite.
Because of this, the vegetables Jodi was eating were mutated, causing her to lose weight rapidly and develop a need to feed on the body fat of humans in order to feel satiated. Clark and Chloe were alerted to Jodi’s strange behavior when they witnessed her rapidly losing weight in just a few days, binge-eating junk food during lunch. Clark eventually found one of their classmates drained of his body fat after Jodi had finished with him. This all led to Clark confronting Jodi at her house, ultimately knocking her unconscious and taking her to the hospital.
Adams has the unique honor of being one of the few actors to have been involved in more than one TV show or movie focused on Superman. Smallville may have involved her playing a non-canonical supporting role for one episode but she’d get her chance to play a bigger role in the DCEU. In 2013, Adams returned to the world of Superman to play Lois Lane in Man of Steel and reprised her role in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and again in Justice League.
Next: Smallville: 10 Questions We Still Have Almost A Decade After the Finale
