Bryce Dallas Howard: Good at being bad

Bryce Dallas Howard's sweet, otherworldly innocence got her started in movies. These days, though, she's acting as nasty as she can.

On the heels of playing the sadistic vampire Victoria in last year's Eclipse, Howard can now be seen as the conniving racist Hilly Holbrook in the big-screen adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's hugely popular novel The Help.

"Hilly is not a nice person," Howard says with a laugh during an interview in L.A. "But she's also unintentionally laughable sometimes. That doesn't make her less hateful, but it does help if you're playing that kind of character."

Set in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, as segregation enters its final, ugly death throes, The Help follows recent college graduate Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), as she chronicles the lives of the black domestic servants who helped raise so many white kids like herself. While the project brings an unfamiliar attention to the black women, snobby, often hysterical Hilly tries to push things the other way, even going so far as to encourage households to install separate toilets outside for the "coloured help."

Appalling as that sounds now, it was how things often were in the Jim Crow South, a shameful period that Mississippian Stockett has captured in a compelling way.

"The script is remarkably faithful to the book, which makes it amazingly good," notes Howard, who turned 30 earlier this year. "It shows the times and the attitudes and the civil rights movement in a strong, realistic way."

Howard says Tate Taylor, the actor (he was most recently in Winter's Bone) and childhood friend of Stockett's who adapted the novel and directed the movie, gets the credit for maintaining that authentic Southern flavour. That nod to Taylor is in keeping with Howard's general appreciation of distinctive filmmakers, an appreciation which has guided her career ever since M. Night Shyamalan plucked her out of a New York stage play and cast her in The Village.

Since then, Howard has worked for auteurs as diverse as Sam Raimi (Spider-Man 3), Kenneth Branagh (As You Like It), Lars von Trier (Manderlay) and Clint Eastwood (Hereafter).

"I’ve been very lucky," she acknowledges. "My primary goal with a film is to be a vessel for the filmmaker. I don't really have a set process, I really just try to understand what the filmmaker is hoping to achieve, and then adapt to their process and try to support achieving those goals. Because of that, my main focus with films is to find movies with filmmakers who I feel have a really singular voice and distinctive take on storytelling. Thus far, I've had a lot of those experiences, and it's been great.

That would be because her dad is actor-turned-Oscar-winning-directorRon Howard. As a child and then a teen, she appeared as an extra in her father's movies Parenthood, Apollo 13 and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. But following the previous two Howard generations into acting (her grandparents Rance and Jean Howard have long filmographies) was never a foregone conclusion."I think it's perhaps a bit Freudian, too," she adds with a laugh, "just wanting to understand the filmmaker, you know?"

"I didn't necessarily know that I wanted to be an actor, but I was always an imaginative kid," Howard recalls. "And I loved going to sets, that was my favourite thing. It really happened more when I was applying to colleges and had to declare a major. I had been doing school plays, but I wanted to focus on writing. At NYU, you could do a double major and I thought, why not focus on acting and writing?"

So how did her folks, who moved to Connecticut primarily to prevent their four kids from going Hollywood, react to that news?

"My parents have been totally supportive," says Howard, who, for a while, auditioned as Bryce Dallas so as not to capitalize on the family name. "They didn't want any of us to try to be a professional actor before we were 18, but after we were adults, anything that we chose to do, as long as we could support ourselves financially, they were for us."

That support has finally blossomed into a creative collaboration with her dad. It was recently announced that Ron will produce and Bryce will direct a short film for Project Imagin8ion, a Canon camera campaign in which photos submitted by digital camera users will inspire a movie.

With any luck, Howard will also be back in Canada soon, where she worked on two of her last three features. "I love Vancouver," she says. "I made Eclipse and the Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon Levitt comedy 50/50 there. Seth showed me around a bit, it's such a cool place."

Set for release this September, 50/50 is the semi-autobiographical story of writer Will Reiser's youthful struggle with a deadly disease.

"The film's original title was I'm With Cancer, so that gives you some idea of the tone," says Howard, who, despite the film's sensitive subject matter, did not put her bad-girl streak on hold for the role — she plays a self-absorbed artist without much compassion. "It has a lot of depth and a lot of emotion, but it is hilarious. I play Joseph's character's girlfriend. He's the one with cancer, and she deals with it in not the greatest way."

Bob Strauss lives in L.A. where he writes about movies and filmmakers.

Coolest. Godfather. Ever.

Although Bryce Dallas Howard tried to distance herself from her famous father, "Happy Days" star Ron Howard, early in her career, there’s no distancing herself from the fact iconic "Happy Days" hoodlum with a heart Arthur Fonzarelli, a.k.a actor Henry Winkler, is her godfather. Now that's cool.

Cineplex
xoxo
Carrie