Bryce Dallas Howard: 'Dads changing diapers is still somehow revolutionary'

The actor has made a film about fathers - including her own, director Ron. She talks about the racist role that caused a disturbance' in her soul - and why working with Lars von Trier gave her acne

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.