Bryce Dallas Howard: ‘I’m not all bad …’

“It’s very strange to be playing someone so full of hate, when my body is literally filled with love,” she smiles wistfully, her hand absent-mindedly running circles over the loose royal-blue silk dress covering her swelling belly.

Cast as the villain in The Help, it wouldn’t be the dream role for many actors. The baddie amid a group of warm and witty women, her co-stars including Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer. Based on Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller set in the racially charged Mississippi of the 1960s, Howard plays Hilly Holbrook, a prejudiced snob, a character so spiteful, that even her father, actor-turned-Oscar-winning-director and movie mogul Ron Howard, cautioned her against taking the role.

“It was really hard for me at first because I genuinely couldn’t understand her psychology and I kept thinking of her as kind of like Cruella de Vil,” admits Howard, 30. “For me, it was never just about being the mean one. She’s actually a genuinely ignorant person who believes in what’s she’s doing and not only believes in it but thinks it’s the right thing to do and the courageous thing to do. That was a very terrifying notion, especially when you look back on history and all those people who represented that. It was a real journey for me to understand her ignorance.”

But evil is the last thing on her mind at the moment as she contemplates motherhood a second time with actor husband Seth Gabel, with whom she has a four-and-a half-year-old son, Theo.

Having bravely spoken out about the 18 months of postnatal depression she endured following her son’s birth, she’s optimistic that she won’t necessarily endure the same ordeal this time round.

“If I do have the same symptoms, at least I will recognise them and that, in itself, makes it much easier,” she says.

Having experienced difficulty breast-feeding following her first birth, she was so devastated by the ensuing depression that she contributed a first-person account to Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP blog, detailing her feelings of helplessness, how she found herself crying in the shower, yelling expletives at her husband and referring to her son as “it”.

“Do I wish I had never endured post-partum depression? Absolutely. But to deny the experience is to deny who I am. I still mourn the loss of what could have been, but I also feel deep gratitude for those who stood by me, for the lesson that we must never be afraid to ask for help,” wrote the actress, who finally found help through a combination of homeopathic treatments and sessions with a doctor and therapist.

Given her traumatic experience, it would be understandable if she had stopped at one child but she says: “I totally planned my second baby. The first one was a surprise. But with this one, I got the strong feeling that I was supposed to have another child. Then the same week my husband asked ‘Do you think we’re supposed to have another kid?’ and then our son started talking about having a sibling when he’d never said anything before.

“So I really felt like this person was knocking on all our doors saying ‘Come on, guys, get with the programme! I want to be born!’” laughs Howard, who discovered she was pregnant with her first child a week after her wedding to college sweetheart Gabel in 2006.

The couple had dated for five years and it was joyous news. “The first time I met my future husband at college, I knew we were going to get married. I just knew it. I went home and I wrote it in my journal. I think this happens for a lot of people -- you just get a really strong feeling,” says Howard, who studied with Gabel at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“I had a co-ed bachelor party the night before I got married, and a friend told me this really weird thing that I didn’t understand, that there was a child coming through me; like a soul or a spirit that was really close to coming into my life. He described this spirit’s traits very specifically. Seven days after I got married I found out that I was pregnant, which is wild -- and Theo has completely exhibited these traits.”

Not that she was totally surprised by how the unusual prediction came about: “There are a lot of people in my family who have psychic abilities which is really weird because we’re a simple mid-Western family and we don’t get caught up in those kinds of things. But I definitely believe that there are people who have those kind of abilities.

“I’m a very spiritual person and I do believe in an afterlife. It gives me peace of mind. Not so much through religion. I do believe that, upon death, it’s another chapter of the adventure, whatever it might be. Its not the end. It’s not just nothingness,” she says.

To describe a pregnant woman as radiant seems trite. However, in Howard’s case, even when not expectant, she conveys a luminosity with her china-white skin, blue-green eyes and shimmering red hair; an ethereal pre-Raphaelite beauty reminiscent of an Edward Burne-Jones painting.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about her is her old-fashioned decency. She’s so conventional that she’s almost unconventional in a city where being different is everything. She has no tattoos, no piercings and, to this day, has never drank even the slightest sip of alcohol.

“I live a block away from my best friend and a block away from my sister and her husband, who is my husband’s best friend. I actually met Seth because they used to be room-mates. I live in such a wonderful little community, I would never want to live anywhere else. It’s amazing that we get to walk to one another’s houses. Its like we’re living in the 50s.”

Just as I’m basking in this retro suburban image of borrowed cups of sugar, chequered aprons and home-baked cakes, she admits she’s no domestic goddess: “I’m a terrible cook and my husband is a really good cook. The reason why I remain terrible is because I don’t want to ever not be able to turn to him and say ‘Could you please cook me something…’. He just knows that if he doesn’t cook something then nothing’s getting made because I’m just god-awful.”

Conceived in Dallas, Texas -- hence her middle name - and born in Los Angeles, she is the eldest of four children born to former Happy Days star Ron Howard and writer Cheryl Alley. So determined were her parents to raise sensible children, the family relocated to a farm in Greenwich, Connecticut, when she was five years old. Encouraged to play outside instead of watching TV is a move she applauds although she’s more than happy to raise her own family in Los Angeles.

Reflecting on what must have been a very difficult decision for her parents, she says: “Looking back, I can see how there are challenges for any working parent. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and that was really challenging too. I think it’s hard to be a parent. It’s complicated and there’s a lot of difficult decisions that you have to make for your child and for yourself and for your family.

“Only now, as an adult, can I appreciate how courageous it was for my parents to move because they didn’t know anybody there [in Connecticut], and also for my dad’s career. It must have been hard being away from LA. But we were always on movie sets. We were never apart. The first time I didn’t join my parents was when I was 16 because I was really involved in school. I’d been on every movie set before that. I was sheltered from the industry lifestyle but not from the experience of the set.”

Proud to be her father’s daughter -- even following in his footsteps by becoming his co-producer on Gus Van Sant’s upcoming drama Restless -- she wasn’t initially convinced that acting was the right career for her.

“I was a creative kid but my first fascination was writing. I was obsessed with writing,” says the actress, who was just eight years old when she made her acting debut in her father’s 1989 movie, Parenthood, later making an uncredited appearance in his Apollo 13.

“But when I got to high school I began acting in school plays. I started out being in South Pacific as Nurse No 456 or something. By the time senior year rolled around, I got some good parts and thought to myself, ’Mmm, I really would like to study this more.’.”

Were her parents supportive? “When I first told my parents I wanted to be an actor, they didn’t look at me like I was crazy. They told me that I needed to be able to support myself financially while I did this. My uncle is an actor and my grandfather and grandmother and they were very dedicated. When my grandmother was 68, she was still doing scene classes.”

Never expecting a free ride to Hollywood, she helped pay her own way through college by working as a nanny.

“I was a nanny for several years and also during the time when I’d just started doing theatre. You can’t really make a living doing that alone. I love children and I really valued the relationships I had with the child’s mother and father and it was a wonderful job for me. Today I’m very grateful for the support that I’ve received with raising my own son and being a working mom.

“It’s interesting to me that acting has actually been the source of my living. I didn’t plan for it. I just thought it was something that I would grow in to or something that would be just like a hobby,” says the actress who was ultimately ‘discovered’ by M Night Shyamalan who cast her in her first major role in The Village in 2004 opposite Joaquin Phoenix and Sigourney Weaver, before giving her the lead in the eponymous Lady In The Water two years later.

Hollywood wasn’t slow to catch on. Kenneth Branagh cast her in As You Like It the same year, before she made the leap to multi-million-dollar blockbuster Spider-Man 3 as Gwen Stacy in 2007.

In 2010, she played the vampire Victoria, bent on killing Bella Swan in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.

She also co-wrote the 2006 short Orchids with partner Dane Charbeneau, which also served as her directorial debut.

“I’ve also done another script that I’m still rewriting,” she says, referring to The Originals, an ensemble film about a group of twenty-somethings who gather for a weekend in New York after learning that the teacher who shaped their childhoods has fallen into a mysterious coma. With Zoe Saldana already attached, Howard’s father is set to produce it.

If it seems that Howard has had more than her fair share of advantages, then the result is her better understanding of the business as opposed to any diva attitude. She is commended by her directors for accepting criticism without tears or histrionics, as her director on The Help, Tate Taylor, will testify.

“I don’t see the point in hearing anything less than the truth,” she shrugs when you repeat Taylor’s praise. “I’ve been accused of being quite tough-minded. It’s because I see so many times with directors their need to factor in an actor’s sensitivity in the way in which they give direction and I just want to take that out of the equation. I want to hear exactly what the director’s thinking. It just helps me to achieve their vision. We’re all just trying to tell a story well.”

With The Help, Howard’s role is pivotal, bringing to life a figure already loathed by the millions of readers who helped keep the book on the New York Times Bestseller list for 103 weeks.

“The thing about the book is that you love to hate her. She’s unlikeable but she’s also the villain, so there’s some gravitas to that and so she’s scary.”

Having spent several months working with a dialect coach to get the Deep South accent just right, she says, “The thing that was trickier for me was trying to understand this woman’s psychology and how she was the way that she was. It was really hard for me not to judge her. I still judge her. She just seemed like a terrible, horrible, evil person.

“Actors will often say it’s fun playing the villain and, in that sense, she was fun but in my private moments, there were times when I was a little freaked. I didn’t want to be that. I didn’t want to, during the time in which I was doing the scene, think in the way that I was thinking and say the words that I was going to say.”

If audiences are often sceptical of seeing real-life couples acting together on screen, then Howard has her own reasons for not wanting to work with her husband, who had a small role in The Da Vinci Code although has primarily found success on TV appearing in Dirty Sexy Money, United States of Tara and Fringe.

“I directed my husband in a play in college, and he’s so not reverent of me. He was always questioning what I was doing. We’ve not worked together since,” she smiles, neglecting to mention the brief cameo she made kissing her husband in the 2008 romantic drama Good Dick, created by their Scottish friend Marianna Palka. “It’s not something that either one of us is striving for. It’s just not one of our goals.”

For the moment the couple are happy to just have just one joint project in the works. “No pregnancy is ever the same, I’m told. With this one I constantly feel like nothing in my body is quite working,” Howard says. “I had all these strategies for pregnancy. For example, I was going to get in the best shape ever before and then I was going to maintain it. But then I got pregnant and started feeling nauseous to the point where I can only eat bagels, and I’m gaining so much weight. But it’s also kind of wonderful to be so out of control because I think we try to control our health and we try to control our appearance when we can’t honestly. I feel very free right now.”

The Help (12A) is out now.