You would expect Bryce Dallas Howard to be a garden-variety L.A. celebritot. It would be easy to imagine the daughter of Oscar-winning director Ron Howard sporting the latest Chloé bag, Juicy sweats and gargantuan sunglasses. You know the type: the kind that gets into fender benders while evading the paparazzi and shows up at Hollywood clubs with two bodyguards in tow. If Bryce were that way, America would already be obsessed with how much she weighs. She'd hang out at Koi with Kimberly Stewart, Nicole Richie and Ashlee Simpson. Her life in L.A. would resemble a reality show, with fresh installments every Monday in the pages of Us Weekly.
But Bryce Dallas Howard is none of the above.
She is the antithesis of the spoiled Beverly Hills brat. In fact, she grew up on the other side of the continent from Hollywood. And at 24, despite starring opposite Joaquin Phoenix in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village and replacing Nicole Kidman in Lars von Trier's Dogville sequel, Manderlay, the talented actress isn't even that famous -- yet. And while she might never become Hilton-grade tabloid bait, Bryce is about to emerge as the silver screen's next big thing.
"The Hollywood scene, these parties, freak me out," she whispers, as if she's afraid she might offend someone. She's sipping a herbal tonic in the bamboo-decked garden of Elixir, a tranquil health-food spot in West Hollywood. With her milky skin, flame-red hair and almond-shaped green-blue eyes, Bryce is arresting. She has the all-American good-girl looks of Claire Danes, spliced with the exotic, extraterrestrial beauty of Tilda Swinton. "I've never had a sip of alcohol in my life," she says. "I wasn't interested in losing control. There was alcoholism in my family, so I saw the negative effects and how difficult it was to recover. When I was in high school, I would never go to parties because I would be embarrassed to say no. Consequently, I had almost no social group."
Bryce's parents decided to raise their four children as far away from Hollywood as possible. Ron and Cheryl Howard, who have been together since they were 16, lived with their kids in Westchester County, New York, and Greenwich, Connecticut. Bryce is the oldest (she has a brother and twin sisters), and she got her middle name because she was conceived in Dallas, Texas. Her twin sisters have the same middle name -- Carlyle, as in the expensive Madison Avenue hotel. "It's kind of raunchy," Bryce says. She attended tony Greenwich Country Day, the same school as George H.W. Bush. "It gave me a sense of uniqueness," she recalls of the preppy environment. "We were the weirdos. Everyone was from old money or involved in the stock market or IBM. We were the wacky artists who had a farm on their property." Bryce, who claims to have been a "total nerd," discovered existentialism as a senior in high school and fell in love. "I was like, 'This is it! This is my religion.' I had never felt a connection to any sort of spirituality before that. It was very basic -- you're responsible for the choices that you make -- but it was mind-blowing at the time." In her spare hours she devoured books by Sartre, Beckett and Camus. She says her 10th-grade English teacher, Mr. Scotch, was one of her best friends.
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