Trailer: Why Is Amy in the Bath?
In 2021, two journalists started an investigation to answer what seemed like a simple question: Why does the actress Amy Adams do so many bathing scenes? This is the story of how Gabby Lombardo and Brandon Reynolds opened the tap on the secret history of bathtubs in cinema. They could not imagine what would come bubbling up.
From Grab Bag Collab and Because It’s True Productions, the 9-part podcast series Why Is Amy in the Bath? looks at the deeper meaning of bathing across 1,500 films. We talk to the writers, actors, and set designers who bring bathing scenes to life, and to the film wonks who help us unpack the conspiracy. It takes us into some very weird places: Wellness and Calgon commercials, hit thriller novels, consumer trends, sex in America, and the way nostalgia traps us in an endless now. Alternately a warm soak and a bracing blast of cold, Why Is Amy in the Bath? will leave us all a little cleaner in heart and mind.
Episode 1: Why IS Amy in the Bath?
It began, like so many stupid journeys, with a stupid question: Why does the actress Amy Adams do so many bathing scenes? From the beginning, we suspected a conspiracy. Is Amy, who has never won an Oscar, doing all these bathtub scenes because they offer the opportunity for the kind of dramatic acting that earns the biggest, goldenest prizes?
So, in 2021, two journalists — Gabby Lombardo and Brandon Reynolds — opened the tap on the secret history of bathtubs in cinema. We could not imagine what would come bubbling up.
In this episode, we begin reckoning with who Amy is — our personal history with her movies, yes, but also … how many bathtub and shower and leisure-water scenes she’s actually done. That data is the first step in our investigation, and it will send us back to the very beginning of the movies.
Episode 2: One Hundred Years of Wet Hollywood
In which we discover a secret history of cinema — a history that created American pop culture one terrifying shower and screwball bathtub scene at a time. One in which the hot tub plays a major role in the war on drugs and the battle of the sexes, and sci-fi visions imagine bathtubs of the future as places for healing, transformation, and goo.
In this episode, Gabby and Brandon dig into their sample of 1,500 movies from 1927 to today, talk to film scholars, correct some misinformation on Cleopatra, and answer the question of just which is more popular in movies: the shower or the tub.
This is the true Hollywood story those dry and dirty oligarchs don’t want you to hear.
Episode 3: Into the Shabby Heart of Prestige
We wanted a mission. And for our sins, they sent us to Hollywood.
In this episode, Gabby and Brandon finally confront the very nature of prestige by taking a tour of duty to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and by tackling the bathing data for every film ever nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. Will Brandon’s Prestige Bathtub Theory (PBT) hold? How does Amy Adams compare to other A-listers? And which movie tropes are guaranteed winners? Hint: Nazis who can’t read.
On an accidentally significant day, our duo goes to the stars looking for the meaning of escape.
Episode 4: Heartbreak Feels Good in a Place Like This
In which Gabby and Brandon find themselves embroiled in an imitation game. Following Amy Adams’ career through the Century of Tubs, we find ourselves face to face with the bathing scenes of the modern traumatized woman of the psychological thriller, and one of the authors responsible for rejuvenating the genre: Gillian Flynn, she of Gone Girl and Sharp Objects.
Unfortunately, there’s another podcast stalking ours, and its focus is another 21st-Century Bathing Queen: Nicole Kidman. In this episode, an exploration of profitable trauma and all its imitators, all devoured by the endless hunger of streaming giants that just might want to turn a certain podcast into a TV docuseries. But is it the pod you’re thinking of?
Episode 5: Irish Spring for the Drowning Girl
In which Gabby reveals that her own bathing saga is much, much older than this one investigative series. In which Brandon embraces the mystical power of Holistic Journalism. In which the both of them try to figure out why this is the Century of Bathing by looking into wellness, and Goop, and home improvement shows. In which a chance meeting on a rooftop leads to a stunning revelation about the secret purpose of shower fixtures, and what that means for all those drowning girls who don’t want the help of any Brads.
In which we ask: Who wants us in the tub? And for what purpose?
Episode 6: The 2025 Oscars Are All Wet
The whole reason we put out Why Is Amy in the Bath? now is that we thought Amy Adams might finally get her Oscar, for Nightbitch. We suspected this year would be important. (We were right.) And, at long last, we now know how the 2025 Academy Awards turned out. But so does everybody, so who cares, right?
Ah, but we’re the only ones who know what those winners and losers really mean to the long history of the Oscars, and what-all that has to do with questions of race, class, and various bodies of water. How is Anora actually a watery retelling of Pygmalion (1928), the first-ever Best Actress nominee with a bathtub scene, plus My Fair Lady (1964) and Pretty Woman (1990)? What do prison hose-downs say about who our culture thinks really deserves a luxurious soak? How come Nightbitch got snubbed when The Substance nearly won? Why in the hell are shower scenes on the rise as bathtub scenes seem to be swirling down the drain?
And, perhaps most importantly: What do this year’s Oscar winners tell us about the Century of Bathing?
A lot, it turns out. Like, maybe a Bathing Singularity really is upon us.
So grab a piña colada, hop on that mechanical bull, and let’s get into the only Oscars recap that actually matters.
Episode 7: Happiness Is a Warm Tub
Our investigation culminates with us settling once more into the tub, which has the best view of the end of the world.
We finally talk to an actress who’s done a bathtub scene: Autumn Reeser, whose experience in a time-loop movie woke her up to the time loop she was living in her real life.
Then, a quick shower over a sea of fog and we’re ready at last to face the everyday apocalypse we’ve been afraid to confront for more than three years: Why, on this earth or any other, is Amy in the bath?
A sublime question for a sublimating age.
Bonus Episode: An Interview with David Magee
If you tuned in to Episode 2, you got a taste of our interview with two-time Academy Award nominee David Magee, the screenwriter for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008), aka Amy’s first bathtub performance. Here’s our longer chat with David. He explains, among other things, how to write a scene in which kids are pulled into a magical realm through the bathtub in such a way that it doesn’t look like they’re being drowned.
Bonus Episode: Eat, Pray, Tub
In which we consider the late-20th-century rom-coms of Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers — a world of husbands having heart attacks while in the throes of passion, fabulous bathroom tile, appealing French gynecologists, and, of course, eating sundaes by the side of the tub. From there, we’ll get into how Julie & Julia is really a manifesto for the rise of the self-obsessed influencer class … and how it would be a better movie if it was called Julie vs. Julia.