Bryce Dallas Howard stars in The Help, where she plays a typical southern housewife in the 1960s.
This Mississippi housewife is just like any other white woman of her time, she is not to fond of her colored help.
However, Bryce definitely isn’t like any other actress.
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Daughter of famed director and actor Ron Howard, Bryce is gifted at her craft and at times, we found ourselves actually liking her character.
Yes, Bryce did that good of a job, but that’s because she’s that amazing of an actress.
We sat down with Bryce for an exclusive interview, check it out below.
What’s the importance of a movie like this to you?
Bryce Dallas Howard: It’s a really good movie and I really like being in a good movie, that’s a wonderful thing. I read this script first and then I had auditioned for Hilly and then I read the book. She’s just this character that you love to hate and there aren’t many of those characters. There’s like Nurse Rachet and stuff like that but it’s just ― to play someone who really thinks they’re doing the right thing — it’s so terrifying and just ultimately such a juicy role.
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Was this one of those projects that as the shooting process goes along you start learning and absorbing more about the experience these people would’ve gone through?
Well, fortunately we shot in Greenwood, Mississippi which I think added so much to the movie. Because it’s actually, in terms of the Civil Rights Movement, it’s a very historically important town, a lot of things went down there and being there, it was so clear how recent this experience is in our country’s history.
We also, when we went there, had three weeks of rehearsal, so we had time to sit in that, we had time to talk about it.
You had time to absorb the culture, soak up what the people were like and pick up stuff that was going around the city, so you could perhaps use it in your role?
Yeah and hear stories and talk to people who had lived through that time, which were a lot of them, these are our parent’s generation. That was definitely important. That added a lot to the whole experience and it’s something that I’ll never forget.
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How much did you know about that area, going in?
It’s never enough, never enough. I of course knew things from books and from school. My mother was raised in the South for a good part of her childhood and hearing her stories and documentaries and things like that. But that’s one of the things you get from doing a movie like this, is that you get to truly imagine what it would’ve been like and bring it to life and I think that’s important to experience, I just do.
What’s a movie you’ve watched in the past that immediately moved you and always stuck with you?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest really stuck with me, like REALLY stuck with me. When I was younger and I watched it way too many times. Yeah, there’s a few of them that you just watch at a particular moment in your growth. Whether or not it’s because you watch something that’s romance right around the time that your beginning to fall in love with people or have crushes on people, and it kind of defines the way you fall in love.
This is a really inspirational movie about someone who has the courage to share their story and a group of women who come together to support that. If this affects one person who would be normally staying silent about something that they need to say and they actually say it, that would be so incredible. So that’s the power of movies, it can do that. It doesn’t always do it, actually it doesn’t often do it, but sometimes a movie comes along that makes a difference.
