Amy Adams Helped Save a Stabbing Victim’s Life Using Skills She Learned on a TV Show That Was Canceled After 5 Episodes

Adams and her dad had just left their favorite Santa Monica restaurant when they came on a man who’d been stabbed in the neck. His friends were panicking. People were screaming that he was dying. Her husband hung back with their young daughter. “These people were screaming and a guy was walking and they were yelling, ‘He’s dying!'” she said on a recent episode of the SmartLess podcast. “And my husband’s like, ‘That’s blood!'”

She and her dad went in. They grabbed beach towels, pressed them hard against the wound, and she worked to keep the man from thrashing while they waited for paramedics. “The more you struggle, the faster you’re going to bleed,” she told him. “Just lay down.”

The training she leaned on came from a job two decades earlier. Long before the six Oscar nominations, before Arrival and American Hustle and Enchanted, Adams took an early-career role on a CBS medical drama called Dr. Vegas, playing a registered nurse named Alice Doherty opposite Rob Lowe. The show premiered in 2004 and was gone almost immediately, canceled after just 5 episodes. By any normal measure, it was a forgettable footnote in her career.

The basics she’d picked up for that canceled show were the closest thing to medical knowledge she had when a stranger’s life depended on it.

About a year after the rescue, she was at another restaurant when a man approached her. “A guy walks up to me. 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, ‘Oh my God, it’s you.’ And it was him.”

He’d lived. And he’d come to find the woman who learned how to save him on a show almost no one remembers.

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