A Boo-tiful Find: The Village's Bryce Howard

Though her red hair and her last name should be dead giveaways, Bryce Howard will admit under duress that she’s the daughter of actor and director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13). And in answer to your next question: “I have yet to see an episode of Happy Days,” says the 23-year-old actress. “It would just be weird. Plus, my godfather is Henry Winkler, so it’s just a double dose of strangeness.” For all her dad’s accomplishments, she’s most fond of his work in an episode of The Simpsons, one that also depicted the Howard offspring as “a bunch of shrill, freckled children. It’s my proudest moment.”

 

Though her red hair and her last name should be dead giveaways, Bryce Howard will admit under duress that she's the daughter of actor and director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13). And in answer to your next question: "I have yet to see an episode of Happy Days," says the 23-year-old actress. "It would just be weird. Plus, my godfather is Henry Winkler, so it's just a double dose of strangeness." For all her dad's accomplishments, she's most fond of his work in an episode of The Simpsons, one that also depicted the Howard offspring as "a bunch of shrill, freckled children. It's my proudest moment."

FRIGHT SHIFT To prepare for her starring role in this month's The Village, a 19th-century period horror film from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs), Howard and her costars were subjected to several weeks of farm training, "learning how to plow, how to clip the nastiness around a sheep's udder, that sort of thing." Then the cast spent an additional week living on its own in the woods of Pennsylvania, where Howard made a startling observation: "Adrien Brody is really clean. He was skinning rabbits and making fires and digging holes, and yet he looked fabulous the entire time. I don't understand how that was possible."

AMERICAN DECEIT-Y From there, Howard was whisked off to fabulous Trollhattan, Sweden, to film Lars von Trier's latest multi-hour epic, Manderlay, in which she reprises the role of the oppressed heroine Nicole Kidman originated in Dogville. ("He seems to enjoy working with redheads," Howard says with a laugh.) Despite von Trier's anti-American reputation, Howard says the Dogme director is a flag-waving fan of Stateside culture: "He has an Xbox in his room, and he travels around in a camper listening to Britney Spears. I came with all this Trident gum, and he stole it all!"