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 f***’. 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.
