Her father Ron may be one of Hollywood’s biggest filmmakers, but 23-year-old Bryce Dallas Howard is making it in the movies the hard way.
Depending, of course, on how you define hard. Fresh out of drama school at New York University, Howard was playing Rosalind in a Public Theatre production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” when director M. Night Shyamalan was casting his latest thriller, “The Village.”
He caught her act and was instantly convinced that she would be perfect for Ivy Walker, an exuberant blind girl who must venture into the frightening woods outside of her agrarian community. He arranged a lunch with the actress, where he offered her the job without so much as an audition.
A first-time film actor’s dream? Yes, but with a certain nightmarish quality attached.
“When I got the role, it was under such special circumstances that I just tried not to dwell on the fact that this was nearly an impossible task,” Howard says. “I went into sort of kamikaze mode. It was only the day after we finished filming that the scope of what I had done kind of struck me, and I had a bit of a mild breakdown.”
The biggest challenge was, of course, pretending to be blind. To prepare, Howard read as much material as she could on the subject.
“I went to a place called The Lighthouse in New York City, and they really instructed me as to what I would have to do as a sighted person to have any understanding of what it would be like to be blind,” she says. “I spent a large portion of every day blindfolded.”
Although her father directed the likes of “Apollo 13” and the Oscar-winning “A Beautiful Mind” and played little Opie on “The Andy Griffith Show” and Richie Cunningham on “Happy Days,” he never pushed any of his four children into the family business.
“They’ve always been encouraging of anything that I do,” Bryce says of her parents. “However, my dad has said, ‘If there is anything else you can do, I would recommend that, because it is a very difficult profession.’ “
Howard recently completed filming “Manderlay,” the sequel to Lars von Trier’s controversial “Dogville,” in Sweden. Talk about challenges: She continues the role Nicole Kidman indelibly created in the earlier film.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Kris Karnopp ([email protected])