EVAN RACHEL WOOD waits. Dressed in a neat Dolce and Gabbana trouser suit, her short hair mahogany brown, she looks every bit the contemporary glamour puss.
The previous night she tramped the red carpet for the BFI London Film Festival screening of George Clooney’s The Ides of March. It’s a grown-up movie. Wood plays an intern during a Democrat presidential primary – Clooney is believable as the candidate – who gets caught up in a familiar class of scandal. You might think the role marks just another pace in the unstoppable advance of a hip movie star.
Wood sees it differently.
“I’m only 24, but I Iook back at my career and I’ve been acting for 20 years,” she says with a nervous laugh. “I’ve done this for so long. But I still feel like things are just beginning. I feel that, after this movie, people will see me as an adult.”
Really? It's true to say that Wood has been with us for a while. At the turn of the century, she starred in the TV series Once and Again. We've seen her in Pretty Persuasion, Down in the Valleyand Across the Universe.A few months ago, she was terrific as Kate Winslet's ghastly daughter in the TV adaptation of Mildred Pierce. But she has always seemed eerily grown up. No wonder, when looking for a prematurely dissolute teenager, Catherine Hardwicke cast her in the searing drama Thirteen.Surely, Wood's been an adult since she was 12 (or so). "The transition has been an odd one," she says (that youthful giggle again).
"It's been easier because, yeah, I was doing adult films. It wasn't like I was a Disney star – not like that is a bad thing." So, was she old before her time? When Thirteenwas released, she made a point of explaining that she was very different from her character. This seemed sensible. The worrying teenager – addicted to shopping and substances – went out of her way to lure a more innocent youth towards dissolution and doom.
“Did I say that? When did I say that?” she says, slightly discomfited. “Well, yeah, she was trying too hard to be older than she actually was.
“But actually I really related to the character. But maybe I didn’t want people to know that at the time. I wasn’t doing drugs when I was young, but I was a caught in that world of self-loathing, of trying to fit in with the girls. I felt that I got to bare my soul there.”
It was, perhaps, inevitable that Wood would drift into acting. Both parents were in the business. Her father, Ira David Wood, was a prominent actor and impresario in Raleigh, north Carolina. Her mother was an actor and director. Rachel had barely learned to walk when she was first nudged on stage for one of her dad’s productions.
Her career really began to surge forward when, following her parents’ divorce, he mother moved her to Los Angeles. “Yeah, that was a really difficult time,” she says, edging the conversation elsewhere. “But my mom never pushed me to do things I didn’t want. She’s an actress and a movie geek. So she got it. She was tough. But that’s good. This business can be hard. But still, it’s not always fun when you’re a teenager and you just want to have fun. I appreciate it now.”
It’s hard to know exactly what Wood makes of her own adolescence. She is keen to assert that she was not put under serious pressure. But she admits that she “never got to be a reckless teenager”. Some time into her career, she did the one thing young actors are warned never to do: she took time off. Over eight months, she travelled around the world and, as she sees it, made up for the college education she never received.
“I had to find things out for myself,” she says. “I never let myself get carried away. So, I took that time out to find myself. A lot of times I had to ask where we were. We’d get off the bus. ‘Oh, this is Belgium.; Okay, let’s enjoy that.”
In the latter half of the last decade she embarked on a highly-publicised relationship with our era's own pantomime Mephistopheles. It's probably not fair to press any actor about their romantic relationships. But who doesn't want to know what Marilyn Manson is really like? One half suspects that, when the blinds are drawn, he spends his time watching The X-Factorin a towelling dressing gown. Having been engaged to the man formerly known as Brian Warner for some time – the cake was cancelled last summer – she must have beans to spill.
“He is exactly as he seems,” she says. “That’s to say he’s the Marilyn and the Manson. He is what he represents on stage. He’s that 24/7. One of the things he prides himself on is that his life becomes part of his art. But also, on the other side, he’s really hilarious. I get it that people are interested in that. It’s totally fine.”
She does seem like a good sport. Not exactly bubbly, but blessed with a sense of humour, she is able to sit back and assess the ups and downs of fame with some maturity. Having recently played an undead queen in True Blood, the popular vampire series, she rather enjoys it when people shout her character’s name on the street. But sometimes the intrusion can be oppressive.
“I have managed to avoid that until now,” she says. “But now they know where I live and I can’t comfortably take my trash out. And that’s a bit of a pain. I usually don’t mind. But sometimes I’m trying to back out of the garage and I can’t because it’s blocked by people. That’s crossing a line.” She goes on to admit that, were she to have children, she’d prefer if they didn’t enter the business at such an early age. There seems little doubt that she does feel some part of her own childhood was snatched away.
Not to worry. This week, she appears in a high-profile movie with lovely Clooney. Every tube station boasts a poster with her name on it. Surely, it’s worth the loss of a few youthful indiscretions to get to appear beside the last of the great movie stars.
“Oh, I’d heard so many things about George and I thought he couldn’t be that awesome. But he really was. Because he’s also an actor, as a director, he knows how actors think,” she says. “He took my whole family out to dinner. He was so sweet. My dad was so proud. It was such fun.” She’s almost bouncing on the seat. Why, she almost seems like a kid.
Almost.
