Bryce Dallas Howard spent a decade battling bioengineered dinosaurs in three Jurassic World in the movies, but off screen, she is known for being far more measured.
“What I always joke about is that I’m the only risk I take in my business, I’m so risk averse,” Argyll star tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue.
Howard, who has a 17-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter with her husband, actor Seth Gabel, says she’s relaxed as a mom — with one caveat.
“I’m not very strict as a parent,” says the 42-year-old, “but I’ll ask my kids, ‘Do you think I’m strict?’ And they say, ‘No, you’re not. Except when it comes to safety.”
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It came to the fore recently when Howard’s oldest learned to drive.
“My son is in the process of getting his license right now, and poor boy, what I put him through,” she laughs. “He can actually be a race car driver at this point because I’m like, ‘You can’t get your license until you know how to do every defensive driving move imaginable.’
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Sam Rockwell and Bryce Dallas Howard in “Argylle.”
Peter Mountain/Universal Pictures
Howard’s usual penchant for cost-benefit analysis attracted her to the action thriller Argyll, in which she plays an introverted writer of spy novels suddenly thrown into a real underground crime syndicate. “It’s a new kind of character” for the actress, “and probably the closest to me as a person I’ve played before.”
The role, he says, fit like a glove. “This movie is so much about her connecting with her power and her connecting with a sense of empowerment and a sense of courage and overcoming her anxiety and coming out and I think for me, making this movie was very empowering.”
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Still, Howard has been putting it all on the line on screen for more than two decades, managing bold turns since her M. Night Shyamalan breakthrough Village 20 years ago (“an incredibly physical film” that was “life-changing in every way,” she recalls) to projects spanning Spider-Man 3, subversive Black mirror turn, Helpand Jurassic World trilogy with Chris Pratt.
“I was born to act, perform and be a storyteller,” says Howard, who was raised mostly outside Los Angeles by her father, director Ron Howard, and mother Cheryl, a writer, the latter of whom partly inspired her latest turn to Argyll. “My mom is a novelist and her imagination is epic and she wants nothing to do with anything social,” he says.
She also slowly built her resume as a director, directing episodes The Mandalorian, The Boba Fett book and upcoming ones Star Wars: Skeleton Crew after years spent studying the process as an actor on film sets. “I love directing and that’s just as important to me as acting,” she says.
Whatever comes next, Howard is ready. “I feel very grateful for this stability in my relationships and in my family,” she says. “And in terms of the wildness of what the future may hold, we’ll see.”
For more on Howard, check out this week’s issue of PEOPLE.
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Source: HIS Education