Bryce Dallas Howard Interview On Voicing Mom's Novel 'In The Face Of Jinn,' Directing Plans

Actress Bryce Dallas Howard, the daughter of director Ron Howard and writer Cheryl Alley, is exploring projects off screen these days — including voicing the audio book for her mother’s 2005 mystery novel, In the Face of Jinn, which was just released by Audible.com. "I’ve always wanted to get to do something like this and then my mom wrote this book," Bryce told Uinterview exclusively. "We were just all kind of hanging out together one day, and my dad brought it up as an idea, and we were like, 'Yeah, this is really good timing.' I just had a baby, and it’s kind of a mellow thing to do."

Conceived in Dallas, which is the origin of her middle name, Howard was born in Los Angeles, but she and her three other siblings weren't encouraged to follow their dad into show business. She was allowed, however, to be an extra in some of her father’s movies, including Parenthood and Apollo 13.

Though she was raised away from Hollywood in Westchester, N.Y., and Greenwich, Conn., she couldn’t stay away from performing. She attended Stagedoor Manor, an upstate New York performing arts summer camp, and studied at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Her breakthrough role came in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), and she gained wide acclaim for her performance in The Help (2011). Currently married with two children, Bryce has set a lighter workload for herself recently. "I did a few directing projects during my maternity leave," she told Uinterview. "And I did quite a lot of development, so hopefully we’ll be putting together a feature." Like father, like daughter.