She’s been nominated for a Tony (twice), an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a SAG award. And she’s won . . . nothing.
But Amy Ryan insists she’s fine with that.
“I think not winning keeps people rooting for you,” she says with a nervous laugh. “If you win, people get mean about it.”
You’d no more kick a kitten than be mean to Ryan, who, in everything from “Gone Baby Gone” to “The Wire” and “The Office,” has made a fierce career out of playing women who seem fragile.
In person — eyes watchful behind cat-eye glasses, blondish hair pulled into a haphazard ponytail — the soft-spoken 42-year-old looks like the librarian next door.
You want to take care of her, the way Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character did in the film “Jack Goes Boating.”
Or comfort her after she’s puked all over your lawn, as David Schwimmer does in “Detroit.”
Oddly, no one in Lisa D’Amour’s dark comedy, which opened to excellent reviews this week at off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons, actually says the D-word, nor is the play set there.
“It’s simply a metaphor,” Ryan says, twisting her ponytail. “I think Detroit is the most obvious example of economic downfall, of people feeling the crunch of losing jobs, of neighborhoods dying, of trying to keep up appearances while everything’s breaking . . .
“I go through it myself. I’m at Bed Bath & Beyond all the time, buying humidifiers, fans — they all break. They’re all disposable!”
She grew up in Flushing, in the same house her father, who owned a trucking business, grew up in.
“It’s the kind of place where you know every house and family, whether you like them or not,” Ryan says. “We had neighbors — we relied on each other.”
Her mother, a nurse, often took Amy and her sister to the theater. One look at “A Chorus Line,” and she knew what she wanted to do. She skipped college and went straight from La Guardia HS to a touring company of Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues.” And she’s worked steadily since — mostly on the East Coast, her area of choice.
That’s especially true now that she and her husband, former “SNL” writer Eric Slovin, bought a $3.1 million apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where they’re raising their young daughter.
“Someone asked me if I ever lived in LA, and I said, ‘Never with more than one suitcase,’ ” Ryan says. “The longest I was ever there was maybe 10 months, and my suitcase was half-packed at all times.”
Busy as she’s been, there haven’t been many glamour roles, and Mary — the put-upon, hard-drinking paralegal she plays in “Detroit” — is no different. Ryan seems to specialize in playing plain.
“Playing plain?” she echoes. “Maybe it just turns out I am plain! If only I had better hair, or a prettier costume . . . Starting in theater, I always believed the play is the thing, and it’s driven by truth. I try to take that with me in TV and film.”
Good hair or not, she’s had some terrific leading men. As Holly, the geeky person from personnel, she enchanted Steve Carell’s Michael Scott in several heady episodes of “The Office.”
“People would stop me on the street [saying], ‘You have to marry him! You have to go back to him!’ ” To which Ryan replied, ever so softly: “But it’s just a TV show!”
And Carell, she says, is “magic.”
“He’s someone who’s so kind and open with his work that you feel you’ve known him your whole life. He generously gives you credit for something he did [in a scene]. Well, OK, I’ll take it! He’s just a dear man.”
What about Hoffman, her “Jack Goes Boating” co-star and director?
“Oh, God — Phil,” she sighs. “Being directed by him and acting alongside him was like having the best seat in the house at a master class. He literally lets you in on his thought process.
“He lets his characters have four thoughts going on at once, which is what real human beings do, but most actors don’t have the dexterity to do it,” she continues. “That’s why he’s so mesmerizing — I can’t take my eyes off him.”
And then there’s Schwimmer, her new best “Friend.”
“Before you start a job, it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be working with the guy from “Friends,”’ and then you meet them — and if you’re lucky, you meet the person, not the personality,” Ryan says. “I just did a movie this summer with 50 Cent” — “The Tomb,” starring the former Curtis Jackson — “and I couldn’t call him 50, I called him Curtis!”
Theater people from Chicago, where Schwimmer’s a known quantity, told her he’s “a theater actor who happened to be on a TV show” — not the other way around.
“Everyone I met, when I told them I was doing a show with him, said, ‘Wait, just wait — you’re in for the time of your life,’ ” she says. “And it turned out to be true. He’s selfless and keeps the crew together — you can see that theater-company vibe coming into play.”
In fact, it was in Chicago that “Detroit” got its start. That production was supposed to come to Broadway last year — with actress Laurie Metcalf playing Mary — but fell through.
“I think Laurie’s busy schedule was my good fortune,” Ryan says. “I do think of her nightly. I think, ‘Was she as tired? Was her hip hurting, too?’”