Bryce Dallas Howard on new movie Deep Cover and the best advice her father Ron Howard ever gave her

Now she’s back in front of the camera for Deep Cover, as an improv comedy teacher infiltrating London’s underworld, with two of her students played by Nick Mohammed and Orlando Bloom. Her father is Ron Howard, director of Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind.

For a film set in the underworld, Deep Cover isn’t hugely violent. In fact, hardly any of your films are violent. Is that a choice?

I love action, adventure and intensity. But I also love stuff I can watch with lots of people. What I like about Deep Cover is that it has that entertaining, commercial, propulsive tone – but I also get to say the f-word throughout!

Your character Kat finds herself in trouble quickly — how do you cope in a crisis?

I get quite calm and say, “Let’s slow everything down and just figure this out.” Listening and being present are crucial skills in a crisis and those are skills that improv teaches you. It teaches you to accept what life gives you and to be adaptable.

Kat isn’t defined by her romantic relationships — there’s no simmering sexual tension between her and Orlando Bloom’s character. Isn’t that unusual?

I’m a very romantic person, I love all that stuff, but that there was no romance was one of the really fun things about the movie. It’s about the chemistry between the three of them – Bonnie, Roach and the Squire, to give them their undercover names. They make an unlikely team because they’re such different personalities. They share this view of themselves as failures. They’re in their 40s and it’s not working out for them, but they go on a journey that shows, eventually, life all adds up.

How good a team player are you?

When I was a kid, I played a lot of sports, and I loved that because of being in it together. Creativity can be a very personal, individual and potentially isolating activity. And I love the rumination, the study, the going-within. But I also love collaborative storytelling and building on what others create. That is when you get happy accidents.

There’s a line in the film, “There are no problems, only opportunities.” Do you agree?

There’s a Chinese proverb that I’ll now bastardise. There’s this farmer and one day, a bunch of horses show up at his farm. Everyone says, “You’re so lucky.” The next day, his son rides one of the horses, falls off and breaks his leg. Everyone says, “You’re so unlucky.” Next day the army shows up to conscript all the non-disabled boys, the son avoids the draft and everyone says, “You’re so lucky.” Life is so much that way. Everything is connected, bad things lead to good, and to see things in terms of success and failure is really binary.

In your episode of Black Mirror, Nosedive, your character pursued others’ approval at the expense of her own happiness. How do you counter your own people-pleasing tendencies?

Therapy! The real answer is, I think, relationships with people who are real with you whether you’re up or down, saying honestly this didn’t work, or this did. But it’s so difficult to manage and we all have those tendencies.

With The Mandalorian, can you explain how a show in which you rarely see the protagonist’s face and his co-star is a puppet can be so profoundly moving?

There’s the father-son dynamic. A caregiver or a parent relates to feeling that responsibility and hopefully rising to the occasion. That [Pedro Pascal] doesn’t take his helmet off allows you to project your own story on what he’s experiencing. But the answer to your question is: the [Grogu] puppet. When you see him for the first time, everybody just melts.

Historically, female directors have been under-represented. But if artistic vision is so individual, does it matter?

I taught a class at New York University for years and diversity was important to me: ethnicity, sexuality, gender, ability, neurodiversity, all of it. The more differing points of view there were, the stronger the collaborations ended up being. We know the statistics and the huge discrepancy in terms of directors and genders. On set, you want as many different brains and histories because it is collaborative storytelling.

What’s the best advice that your dad has given you?

He said once, “If you’re training to be a boxer, you’re training how to throw punches. But you’re also training how to take a hit.” If you’re endeavouring upon anything, you have to learn how to take a punch, metaphorically, so you can keep moving forward. Because if you just shatter, it’s game over.

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Deep Cover is released on Prime Video on Thursday 12th June.

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