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 "The Sixth Sense" 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," says Howard. "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. "Then 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."

Howard's acting chops would seem to come naturally enough. After all, before he started directing the likes of "Apollo 13" and the Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind," Ron Howard played little Opie on "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Happy Days' " Richie Cunningham.

But 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.' "

Whenever she visited Ron's sets, Howard hung out with the crew rather than with actors.

"I was 17 or 18 when I finally admitted that I wanted to pursue this, and that was mostly because of the assumptions that people had made in the past," she admits. "When people had asked me if I wanted to be an actress, I'd say I wanted to be a forensic anthropologist or something weird like that."

As for possibly starring in one of Ron's movies, Bryce is, at best, hesitant.

"It would take an extreme circumstance," she says. "And, also, I need to mature a little bit because, when I act, I become very different than I am around him as his daughter. I become very vulnerable, and he would be put in a strange position in that, as a filmmaker, he would want to capture those moments, but as a father he would want to protect me."

Of course he would, being one of the nicest guys in Hollywood and all. Which he really is, isn't he?

View Comments

"He's so caring and he's so good," Bryce says of her father. "And we totally took advantage of that while we were growing up!"

Of course, no parents are perfect. Consider the reason why Bryce's middle name is Dallas, and her siblings' all are place names, too.

"It's where I was conceived," she says, laughing in mock outrage. "Isn't that just so embarrassing? It's so mortifying to do that to your child."

Speaking of, um, locations, 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.

Join the Conversation
Looking for comments?
Find comments in their new home! Click the buttons at the top or within the article to view them — or use the button below for quick access.