The actress was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and raised in Rockwood, which she described as "a semi-mountain town, very rural" during a 2009 interview with GQ UK.
"My dad used to hunt ducks and my mom would put them in the pot," she recalled, adding, "We lived really modestly. We had very little money."
Her father, who was a parole officer, and her mother divorced when she was 3 years old. "I wanted to be an actress from the time I was 2. My mom said it was the only thing I ever said I wanted to do. When I was 4 or 5, I watched 'The Wizard of Oz,' and for a year, I asked her to call me Dorothy. When my mom explained to me that Dorothy was not real, that an actress plays her, I decided I wanted to be an actress," she said during a 2009 interview with The New York Times.