'I don't want to make films about miserable people'

Bryce Dallas Howard speaks to Adam White about her new comedy Deep Cover’, dad Ron, and why her storytelling mantra is simple: more peril and more dismemberment

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Bryce Dallas Howard has leapt to her feet, laughing wildly. “Whenever I’m on set, I’m just obsessed with danger.” She throws her arms from side to side. “I want danger! I want people impaled! I want a high body count!” A chorus of her assistants and colleagues, sitting with us in a London hotel suite, hoot in recognition. “I want bodies on the wall!” Howard exclaims, “I want dismemberment!” Remember the Darksaber scene in The Mandalorian, she asks. I don’t! (She doesn’t hear me.) “It was so important to me that we saw it slice a body in half. No cutaways. No shadows. You had to see it. Because in storytelling, peril is powerful.” Howard smooths out her jacket and returns to her seat, point made. “Oh God, I can already see the headline,” she says. “‘Bryce Dallas Howard is a sick fuck’. Hahahaha!”

I could never get away with that. But it’d at least be more succinct than “Bryce Dallas Howard, M Night Shyamalan muse turned Jurassic World boffin turned director behind a whole bunch of Star Wars TV shows, is actually far more delightfully kooky than you might imagine”. That’s too much of a mouthful. But, as proven by a bit of time in her company, it is largely true.

A little like her father Ron, the director behind a vast and eclectic catalogue of modern classics including Splash, Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon, Howard has typically been defined by her sturdiness: always dependable, never unwelcome, a true-blue, gold-star Hollywood worker-bee. But that reputation feels limiting, and does her a disservice as an actor. Glance over her 20 years of credits and you’ll be reminded of the ethereal terror she brought to Shyamalan’s The Village, the comic mania of her work in the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive”, or the very English disappointment she embodied so powerfully in the Elton John biopic