Bryce Dallas Howard plays a sea nymph in M. Night Shyamalan’s unusual fantasy Lady in the Water. The actress talks to Abbie Bernstein about the challenges of playing an otherworldly character in a modern fairytale...

Bryce Howard (daughter of Da Vinci Code filmmaker and Happy Days star Ron) first made a splash in M. Night Shyamalan’s previous genre potboiler The Village. While that “period piece” became the film that burst Shyamalan’s critical bubble, praise was nevertheless heaped upon the young Howard for her affecting portrayal of a brave blind girl. But neither working with the acclaimed filmmaker before nor the unusual nature of that character prepared Howard for their next teaming. In fact, Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water makes The Village seem downright conventional. In their latest collaboration Howard plays a creature called a Narf.

The first obvious question is what the heck is a Narf? “It’s a form of water nymph, basically,” Howard explains. Although she’s never played a non-human on film before, Howard feels that her childhood makes her well suited for the character. “It’s a little bizarre, because I collected figurines of mermaids when I was a kid and I’m a pisces, so that’s another connection to the water. When I was a child… this is so dangerous,” she laughs, “I used to tie my legs together and throw myself into the water and try to swim like a mermaid. I’ve always had a slight obsession with that. Even in my adulthood, when I went to Denmark a few years ago [to star in Lars Von Trier’s Manderlay], I had to see the statue of the Little Mermaid. So it’s just really nice to get to do something that tied into my childhood dreams.”

Howard also jumped at the chance to work with Shyamalan again. “He is an amazing human being and I’d say we have a very strong artistic connection. The last day of shooting [on The Village], Night told me the premise of this screenplay. He hadn’t written it yet. He kept me involved in just telling me what his ideas were, but he never offered it to me or alluded to the fact that he was going to ask me to be a part of it. He was just, as a friend, letting me know what he was up to. I feel like he just needed to write it and see who the right person would be, and then when it was completed, he thought, ‘Oh!’ I don’t know if he was thinking of me the whole time. To be honest, I don’t think he was. And then I saw The Village for the first time at his screening room at his office and he offered [Lady in the Water] to me right after that. So it was actually quite a dramatic moment.”

The Life Aquatic

So how exactly does one approach creating a character that’s not human? This was the question at the forefront of Howard’s mind as she read the script. “To approach this character was simultaneously thrilling – it was a creature that was entirely new – and overwhelming, because I was having to create something that was entirely new. She isn’t a human being at all and she cannot even really be mistaken for a human being. She has these very otherworldly qualities, and Night and I worked very hard to create a character that could somehow be relatable, but also was clearly from an entirely different world, and that was actually much more challenging than I thought. I mean, she’s not E.T., but you could tell that she looks at the world and experiences the human world in a very different way than humans.”

Howard’s father, director Ron Howard, made one of the most famous aquatic fantasies of all time, the 1984 mermaid rom-com Splash. The actress says checking it out for reference occurred to her, but it turns out there aren’t too many similarities between that film and Lady in the Water. “Actually, I watched Splash to look for that, but they’re completely different.” However, Howard adds, the difference does not lie in lack of humour. “I have to say, it is the funniest of all of Night’s films.”

While not a massive make-up job, playing Story did involve a regular regimen for Howard to transform into the Narf. “They basically just made me very, very, very, very pale,” Howard laughs. “It was very helpful. It felt like regular make-up, because the make-up artist was just so diligent about making sure that it was something that was going to add to my performance, as opposed to taking away from my performance [by being] uncomfortable. So once it was on, it was like there was nothing different going on. But I would just look in the mirror and look entirely different, and it would inform my character quite a bit.

“A few years ago, I was reading about Audrey Hepburn. She said that she didn’t create her characters – what happened was, she would go and have meetings with all of the designers and they would do the hair and the make-up and the costumes and she would just look in the mirror and say, ‘Who is this girl and what are the assumptions that I would make about this girl?’ And then that’s how she would create her character. And that’s something that you are really discovering through the whole process of trying to create a Narf, because it was just totally from the imagination, and we had to all get on the same page, and once we did, we knew what that was and we knew how that character would react to things, and also how to shoot it. It was a very interesting, informative experience.”

Tall Tail

As Story is a water nymph – she is discovered in a swimming pool – Howard had to spend a lot of time in liquid environments, which she says was helpful in providing context for her performance. “The environment always informs what’s going on, so what I always try to do, just as a rule of acting, is that if something is going on that’s affecting me emotionally, even if it’s just like, ‘Oh, God, I’m sinking into the water’, I try to not fight against it, I try to use it in order to affect the scene or affect my emotional state. So all of that was great. It wasn’t a hindrance at any time.”

It’s no accident that the majority of Howard’s film work – The Village, Lars Von Trier’s Manderlay, Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Lady in the Water and her role as Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man 3 – has been in the fantasy/alternate reality genre. “It is absolutely part of the attraction,” she acknowledges. “It’s a heightened circumstance, heightened stakes, heightened reality. There was a great writer that I sat down with once. I asked him what he was most obsessed with exploring and he said, ‘Relationships.’ My answer was, ‘The bizarre.’ I’m really excited about exploring a world where superheroes exist and where there are mystical creatures in swimming pools and and a film [Manderlay] where they’re exploring a social concept in dramatic language. That’s what’s really thrilling to me. Even in As You Like It, Kenneth Branagh has created this world where we’re in 1800s Japan and it’s been colonized by the English. Those are the things that get me excited when I’m reading a script.”

Beyond acting, Howard is also preparing to write and direct a short film. “We’ll see what comes of that, if I’m any good,” she says with a laugh. “I have no idea how it’s going to unfold.”

Was there one central concept that helped Howard bring Story the Narf to vivid life? “I won’t say [what it is] because it’s a spoiler, but the one thing that I had to hang onto was her purpose in being on Earth. There’s a reason why she’s on Earth and that’s one thing that is very clear from the beginning. I think that because [Lady in the Water] was created initially by Night as a bedtime story for his two little girls, it comes from a very different place emotionally than his previous films. I think there’s just something very special about it, but if you created it for your children and then you’re showing it to the world, it’s so intimate and it’s so personal. I think it’s very courageous of him to do a film like this – you’ll know what I’m talking about when you see it.”