Evan Rachel Wood Issue #39

Ballad of a once-Lolita

By Mila Zuo
Published: March 1st, 2009 | 9:57am

By Mila Zuo
Photos by Roger Erickson
Stylist: Constanze Lyndsay Han
Makeup: Yuroko Bondies for Macgowan Spencer
Hair: Steve David for Macgowan Spencer

Standing apart from Hollywood’s army of tacky enfants terrible, Evan Rachel Wood is a refreshingly aged soul in the lean 5’8” body of a 21-year-old.

From a parent’s worst nightmare in her breakout film Thirteen to the hypersexual Kimberly Joyce in Pretty Persuasion, Wood’s early career rested on her preternatural maturity and ability to bring alluring complexity to the teenage villainess. Nowadays, Wood has ventured far beyond bad-girl pastures and is able to hold to her own alongside the Hollywood regal and mighty — including Al Pacino, Michael Douglas, Cate Blanchett, Annette Bening, and most recently, Mickey Rourke.

Wood’s telephone interview with Venus Zine was sprinkled with self-conscious giggles and the occasional faint mew of her new kitten. Fittingly, as Wood was back in her childhood town, we began by talking about her start in acting, which she once told Craig Kilborn was a stage debut as a one-year-old at the theater her father founded. Ira David Wood’s Theatre In The Park in Raleigh became the ideal backdrop for the budding actress. Referring to her childhood as “magical,” a precocious young Wood thrilled in channeling golden-era Hollywood stars. She says, “I was one of those little girls that freaks the adults out, I think I was just always performing whenever I could. So even just when I was having a conversation with somebody, I would be playing a character. This little two-year old would come up to them and sit down, but I would be acting like Elizabeth Taylor or something.”

With a theatre director father, an actress mother, and an extended family of artists, Wood received invaluable cultural education at an early age and immediately proved she would not depart from her artistic genealogy. Chuckling, she says, “My parents were worried if I wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor or something, like ‘What are we going to do?’” Wood beckoned to the inevitable call of Hollywood and relocated to the West Coast at only six years old, quickly landing roles in television series such as American Gothic and Once and Again.

With a conviction that transcends Wood’s fictional character in 2007’s The Life Before Her Eyes, she tells her best friend, “You think you can say ‘no’ to the whole fucking world. It’s not there to say ‘no’ to.” Indeed, it is Wood’s ability to say “yes” to risky roles that has awarded her the kind of art-house prestige of which many aspirants only dream. Catherine Hardwicke’s 2003 film Thirteen propelled Wood into the American consciousness as the chaste and fair Anglo child who rapidly descends into a pre-teen hell of drug abuse, sadomasochism, and anorexia. Wood’s attraction to the role stemmed from a frustration about the typical depictions of teenage girls.

She says, “I would always get frustrated when I would see films about young girls because I could never relate to them and I thought they were just completely fake. I started saying, ‘Why am I waiting for somebody to make it? Why don’t I just go out and do it instead of complaining about it?” Swerving from her angelic television trajectory, Wood surprised critics with an unexpected spate of raw fury and pre-teen angst. One reporter from The Boston Globe noted, “That this delicate blonde could contain such hurricanes of rage is the most subversive notion the film has to offer.” In retrospect, rather than focusing on her Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress for the film, Wood seems more interested in Thirteen’s larger social impact. She says, “I think the only reason why people didn’t completely write the movie off and just not believe it was because Nikki [Reed] and I were that age, and we were sitting there looking at all of them going, ‘Nope, this is how it is. We’re here right now. We’re trying to warn you.’ People are a lot less shocked by what teenagers are doing and a lot more aware, and I hope [Thirteen] had something to do with that.”

Following the critical acclaim of the socially impacting film wasn’t easy: 2005’s Down in the Valley was the first role Wood accepted after Thirteen and it paired her with cerebral stud Edward Norton. It has remained the only film that has caused her to experience actor’s block. Wood explains, “With Thirteen, nobody was expecting anything from me. You know, I could go and do it and not have any pressure and not think about it and I think that was why it was so good and so free, because, you know, I had nothing to lose. And after, I felt that everyone was watching, waiting to see what I was going to do, and it was the only time I had ever gotten really nervous.” It didn’t help that her first sex scene ever was with Norton, who has stated that Wood was the first and only actress ever seriously considered for the lead female role. “Fun, but yeah I think that was the only time I was just kicking myself everyday going, ‘Oh my God, I forgot how to act, I don’t know how to act anymore!’” Wood exclaims.

Despite Wood’s melodramatic oeuvre, she often uses laughter as an acting method. “I forget how important it is to laugh until I haven’t done it in so long and then something happens and I laugh until I can’t breathe, and it’s just the greatest feeling in the world. I get to relax and let go.” To get through a potentially awkward sex scene, Wood says “laughing through it is always the best ‘cuz then you don’t feel like anybody is feeling weird, or acting weird, or basically getting off on anything. It’s quite the opposite. There’s no way to get turned on,” adding, “I know everybody says that, but it’s true. It’s just not sexy.”

Wood also immerses herself in a character’s mood by listening to music right before a scene. Having her iPod literally “at arm’s length,” Wood mentions that it includes a “crying playlist” and an “angry playlist.” While the crying playlist includes “the scene from To Kill a Mockingbird,” Radiohead, and Pink Floyd. The angry playlist includes the Blood Brothers, Iron Maiden, and yes — Marilyn Manson.

A very public romance and breakup last November with the shock-rocker has elicited the ugliest cyber-gossip Wood has ever experienced regarding her personal life. “It’s so scary and it’s so easy for people to be cruel, just cruel, now. Because they can write something and never show their face. They can criticize you all they want but it’s not like they’re going to put a face behind it,” Wood says. Apparently referring to a breakup rumor that circulated about Wood’s decision to break up over a fight about her brother, Wood defended her ex-boyfriend, referred to simply as “Manson,” for “being by [her] side and taking care of her through the best and worst times” to People magazine. In this cyber-surveillance era of celebrities’ lives, Wood openly calls the actions from these faceless bloggers “cowardly,” adding, “It’s like throwing a rock through somebody’s window and running away.” Perhaps they’re displacing their frustrations unto celebrities because of their meager romantic lives? Wood laughs, “But you know, we’re already pretty down, you don’t need to bring us any lower. We put enough on ourselves, you don’t need to remind us.”

After a few edgy, sexually precocious roles in some of the better indie flicks of the past few years (Pretty Persuasion, Running with Scissors), Wood’s favorite film to shoot has remained Across the Universe, a sweeping and ambitious sixties-era musical set to The Beatles, released in 2007. “She’s the best young actress out there by a mile,” director Julie Taymor once told a Canadian newspaper reporter. “She auditioned for me and I melted, I fell into her beautiful, deep-blue eyes. She was Lucy; there was nobody else.” The affection is mutual. Wood lovingly cooes about Taymor, calling her a “genius” and “one of the most amazing directors out there.” Joking that she adopted Taymor as a second mom, Wood recalls, “I remember emailing her one time when I was slightly down and I was asking her for advice and I just said, ‘You know, I’ve never been happier than when I was living in your world,” ‘cuz she really does, she creates a whole world for you to live in and to play in.” Wood will be able to live and breathe in Taymor’s world once more when rehearsals for the Broadway musical version of Spider-Man will begin in June, starring Wood as Mary Jane Watson.

Wood will also return to the stage of her childhood playroom at Theatre In The Park, to direct and star in a production of Romeo and Juliet, co-directed by her brother. Confessing that she “had to do the part before I died,” Wood seems eager to take a brief interlude from the silver screen. When asked what the hardest part about being a working actress in Hollywood, Wood pauses and says, “I guess finding the balance of doing what you want and being who you are but also having to play the game —‘cuz you can’t not [play the game], as much as you would like to.” Although Wood didn’t elaborate about the Hollywood “game,” even alluding to it reveals that she is unlike other actors who hide behind artificial PR personas and stunts. “Sometimes you can get down on yourself for it because you think you’re compromising yourself and not being true to yourself. If you consider yourself an artist, that’s just like death for an artist, to think that they’re selling out in any way. Some people roll their eyes at it but I can’t help it.” She laughs self-consciously, but firmly states, “I never want to feel like I’m giving up who I am for anybody.”

One thing no one can accuse Wood of is selling out. Even a cursory glance at Wood’s IMDB profile reveals an unwavering commitment to smaller independent productions. Wood finds like-minded, passionate film-lovers working on these movies. On these sets, “it’s usually never about the money.” Wood’s most recent film, another art-house heartbreaker called The Wrestler directed by Darren Aronofsky, saw Wood playing the estranged daughter of a wrestler, played by Mickey Rourke, in his hyperbolic decline. Revealing that she “caught Mickey Rourke off guard” with her acting abilities, Wood complements Rourke’s tenderly understated performance with her shattering angst. As usual, Wood’s delicate frame and porcelain beauty are a surprising backdrop to her engrossing delivery.

Wood will depart from tear-jerking films in the upcoming Woody Allen flick, Whatever Works, and she isn’t afraid to admit that comedy is tough. Playing a Southern blonde airhead, Wood is grateful Allen took a chance on her despite her never having acted in a comedic role before. “Comedy is taking yourself out of reality slightly and realizing how mathematical it all was, because missing a beat is missing a line. So if you take too long of a pause, it ruins the whole joke. You know, one more second can be too long and just ruin it, and it won’t be as funny,” she says. Calling her comedy veteran castmates, Larry David, Michael McKean, and Ed Begley, Jr. “rock stars,” Wood reveled in seeing the rabid fandom showered on them. “If you pass them on the street they would seem just completely normal, and there are people rolling down their windows screaming at Larry David!” she exclaims.

Now that Wood’s schedule has calmed down for a little while, she will redecorate her apartment while possibly watching reality TV, shows like Rock of Love and Project Runway, a guilty pleasure she describes as “throwing ants in a jar and shaking it.” While her redecorating schemes reflect a love of the decadent —“It’s all red, mini-mirrors, mini-tassles, fringe. It’s very kind of French boudoir, opium den”— the vast collection of heart-shaped glasses sprinkled around her house is telling of Wood’s dual embodiment of performer and voyeur. From being cyber-bullied about her personal life to peering into the ant jar from a distance, Wood can now calmly watch the chaos unfold from behind the heart-shaped lenses of a once-Lolita.