Bryce Dallas Howard Recounts Her Childhood with Famous Dad Ron Howard: ‘I Was Such a Messed-Up Kid’

Bryce Dallas Howard is reflecting on the difficulties she experienced in her childhood. 

While promoting her new Prime Video movie Deep Cover, a comedy that also involves corpses and brain splatter, the actress and daughter of popular filmmaker Ron Howard, 44, recalled having unusual interests as a child and struggling to communicate.

“I was such a messed-up kid – I would walk around the Disney lot reading about euthanasia,” Bryce told U.K. newspaper The Independent. “But I also wasn’t dark. There was just a sort of intensity to my feelings and the stories I was curious about.”

“When I was growing up, I had a lot of difficulties learning and communicating,” she said. “I was always very happy and smiley, but not extremely verbal. It was unclear what intelligence was there, and how much I was really processing.”

Bryce is the eldest child of Happy Days star and filmmaker Ron, 71, and his wife of 50 years, author Cheryl Howard. The pair are also parents to twins Jocelyn Carlyle and Paige Carlyle, 40, and son Reed Cross, 38.

Bryce recalled her parents being concerned about her communication skills and taking her to a child psychologist for help.  “ ‘Can we talk about the dead babies?’ the therapist would ask,” the actress recalled, per The Independent. “ ‘Because Bryce talks a lot about dead babies,’ ” she added, laughing. 

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Bryce, however, explained to the outlet that “it wasn’t as bad as it sounded” and that she “just loved dystopian fiction,” listing the novels 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, among her favorite reads. 

Bryce is a mother herself, to son Theodore Norman, 18, and daughter Beatrice, 13, shared with her husband of 18 years, Seth Gabel.

Elsewhere in her interview, the Jurassic World star, who has been acting for over 20 years, said she is grateful to have had parents who encouraged her to pursue a career in acting and to follow in the footsteps of her filmmaking family.

“I felt very lucky because I never had it in my head that if I wasn’t making a living from acting, I was then failing,” she told The Independent. “I’m a third-generation performer. The layers of privilege that I’ve experienced means that there’s a lot that I’m aware of [about the industry], and there’s a lot that I will never be able to understand because of that.”