When actor Bryce Dallas Howard started making the documentary Dads, her family was clear: this was not going to be about them. Her father Ron, the Oscar-winning director of A Beautiful Mind, was adamant that he wouldn’t appear on screen, despite having signed on as producer, while her husband, the actor Seth Gabel, told her: “Don’t make this ‘The Howard Show.’” Then, during production, her brother Reed found out he was going to become a parent. “I needed an expectant father in the film,” she tells me. “So I was, like, ‘All bets are off!’” Now her brother, father and late grandfather all feature in the end product, which is as frothy and sweet-smelling as anyone would expect from something made in partnership with Dove Men+Care.
With her pale skin, copper hair and faintly febrile manner, the 39-year-old Howard is far more interesting than the film. There’s been an eclectic element to many of her career choices: she took over from Nicole Kidman as Grace, the well-meaning reformer whose good intentions go awry, in Lars von Trier’s harrowing Dogville sequel Manderlay, a disquisition on slavery that was shot, like its predecessor, on a bare sound stage with minimal props. (A final instalment, with Howard and Kidman playing sisters, was proposed by Von Trier but never materialised.) She was haunting in two M Night Shyamalan mysteries, one eerie (The Village), the other disastrous (Lady in the Water), and brought some pep to a run of tired franchises (Spider-Man, Twilight, Terminator, Jurassic World) as well as the odd prestige project. She was central to the only memorable scene in The Help, as the segregationist housewife chowing down on poo pie, and appeared last year as Elton John’s brittle, acidic mother in Rocketman.
Her recent career move has occurred without much fanfare. First, she directed the Baby Yoda-heavy fourth episode of the Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian – “As a mom, I loved working with Baby,” she coos – and now comes Dads. The documentary begins with Howard announcing that she wants to know more about what it takes to be a father. But when I ask what it was that she learned, her eventual answer (that men don’t get to have baby showers) is less remarkable than the chorus of whoops and exclamations which precedes it: “Right. Um. Ooh. Yeah. Ha! Hoo. What-did-I-learn, what-did-I-learn?”
I had hoped to get a glimpse of her bookshelves, which seems the least one might expect now that interviews are conducted remotely, but she is coming to me live from what appears to be a broom cupboard, so I can’t tell if she owns a copy of First Dads, John Kendall’s book about the parenting habits of US presidents. Did she know that Obama is apparently the only president ever to change his children’s nappies? “Woahhh!” she cries, lunging forward so that her face fills the laptop screen. “Normalising dads changing diapers is still somehow revolutionary. The ripple effect is that the father establishes competency, the relationship deepens, and the child learns to rely on father for caregiving tenderness. And the mother gets a break!” What does it mean for her to hear Donald Trump claim that a man who changes diapers is “acting like the wife”? “That indicates a limited imagination,” she says firmly. “The more we can crowd out belief systems that go against the evolution of society, the more we will be left with people acting in a manner that benefits the growth of our children.”
Dads is at its strongest during the sections on four domestic setups: two black families and an Asian one, with white fatherhood represented by a gay couple who have taken under their wing an adopted African American brood. Still, it’s hard not to be struck by the ubiquity of filming in some of these households. One father, who hosts a popular video blog about parenting, keeps the camera running even during his children’s tantrums. Another records his teenage daughter sulking and crying, telling her: “My subscribers are gonna love this!”
Howard gave arguably her best performance to date in the Nosedive episode of Black Mirror, in which she played a woman cast out by a society where status is determined by social media approval, so she is well-placed to consider what the effect of all this filming might be. “It’s definitely something I thought about. I think it’s most important to be present and connecting and there. What I observed with Glenn, who does the daddy blog, is that he is so incredibly creative as a storyteller, and he has found a way to include his kids in that process. None of us knows what is going to unfold from our relationship with technology. It’s all about how you do things. If you serve someone pasta with love or pasta with an agenda, that pasta’s going to taste different.” She laughs helplessly at herself, building to an infectious screech: “Who’d want pasta with an agenda, right? No one! Hahaha! ‘Hey, what’s with the agenda?’”
All this talk of fathers with cameras brings Howard back to her own childhood. “It makes me think about growing up on my dad’s sets and loving it. Loving it!” She wore the mermaid’s tail on the set of Splash and one of the alien masks during the making of Cocoon. At the age of five, she accompanied her father on a business trip to Japan, where she had dinner with him, George Lucas and Akira Kurosawa; she can still remember falling asleep during the meal, her head resting on her father’s chest as the conversation ebbed and flowed around her. Later, she had walk-on parts in her dad’s films Parenthood, Apollo 13, The Grinch and A Beautiful Mind. “It was the best thing ever because my dad was sharing his passions with us.”
Ron Howard is generally considered the industry’s safest pair of hands – he was brought in to finish Solo: A Star Wars Story when the original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were sacked – and his daughter suspects he may not have received his due. “I’ve seen folks underestimate his creativity and artistry because of what a great collaborator he is. He really knows how to be in service to the story and he loves actors so much. I’ve been on a lot of movie sets that are not my dad’s and I can tell you he understands film-making.”
Her own acting choices have changed radically since she became a mother. Would she turn down something like Manderlay if it were offered to her now? “Possibly. After having kids, the stakes in my life got a lot higher. I can see the ways in which the stories I’m working on have an impact on me emotionally and how that all plays out with my family. I gravitate more toward entertainment that my kids can also be a part of and that I can talk to them about.”
Her recent work bears this out: as well as the Jurassic World films (including the third one, currently on hold until social distancing restrictions are lifted), she starred in a remake of the Disney fantasy Pete’s Dragon and did voice work on A Dog’s Way Home. But she’s willing to make the occasional exception. “Black Mirror is psychological horror in a way and yet that was great. Loved it! Practically therapeutic. No problem, not disturbing. It changes in life, the places we’re able to navigate emotionally.”
Working on Manderlay, she explains, had a quantifiable physical effect on her. “This may be boring or gross or whatever but I turned 23 while I was making that movie and suddenly I had cystic acne. I’m, like: ‘What?’ Then after the film, it cleared up. And it wasn’t because I’d been wearing a bunch of makeup. It was because of these feelings and what I was needing to sort out within myself. I was having a lovely time with everyone – genuinely loved it. Cross-country skiing with Lars von Trier: highly recommend it. But despite all that, I had internalised the issues of the film.”
What doctors might now term Manderlay Syndrome or Von Trier’s Affliction even spilled over into less obviously traumatising material. “When I was doing The Help it was so much fun to be with that group of women and in those friendships; we really felt like family. And I loved getting to do that movie, mostly because my character got what she deserved. But there were a handful of scenes where she was more on top, being quite evil, and I was sick over it. I had this feeling of churning, churning. I thought, ‘What is happening to me? There’s a disruption in my soul right now.’ It was after that movie that I was like, ‘OK. If it seems like the character has all these crazy things to play, it’s going to affect you.’ So now I’m just cautious about the bodies and spirits I inhabit.”
Dads is streaming on Apple TV+ from 19 June. The Mandalorian is on Disney+.
