STARCHIVES
Evan Rachel Wood
Interview - "The Missing actresses squeeze into a period piece"
by Barbara Vancheroi
(November 28, 2003) 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 
Friday, November 28, 2003


The Missing" demanded that Evan Rachel Wood learn how to handle a horse -- out in the open desert or while scaling a rocky cliff -- skin a deer and wrangle a rifle. And, perhaps most challenging of all, wear a corset and period clothing for the Western set in 1885 New Mexico.

"I had to learn how to shoot my first gun. It wasn't too bad. I just had to learn how to hold the rifle and deal with all the hot shells falling down my shirt," she says from her home in Los Angeles. The idea of doing a period piece had sounded so appealing until the slight teenager squeezed into the costumes.

"The shoes were so tight and so thin and the ground so cold that I almost broke down in tears because my feet were freezing. ... I can't believe how tiny these people were. I'm pretty tiny and even with a corset, I still had to have three people help me into my shirt and hold my waist in. Yeah, it was pretty ridiculous."

*****

In "The Missing," the 16-year-old Wood plays Lilly Gilkeson, a teenage girl kidnapped by desperadoes who plan to sell her and others into slavery in Mexico. Cate Blanchett is her fiercely independent mother who reluctantly accepts the help of her estranged father, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Jenna is Lilly's younger sister, Dot, who is hiding when she witnesses the abduction and other horrors.

*****

Talking from L.A., where she is home-schooled, Wood said "The Missing" was the most grueling project she had ever tackled.

"It was the most physically demanding thing I've ever done in my life, but on top of that, it was also the most emotionally demanding thing, so I had to be afraid for my life every day and always panicked and scared while, at the same time, really having to be out in the middle of the desert on horseback every day, doing stunts, working in the cold and rain."

And she does mean in the middle of the desert, where it might take 45 minutes to get to a road and another hour or more to reach lodging for the cast. That was on top of the 45 minutes to shed her costume, wash off the dust and dirt and take down her hair.

Although Lilly is bound, gagged and witness to brutality and despair, Wood says she was able to leave the haunting moments on the set. "Everybody who was a villain, or who I was supposed to be afraid of, were the sweetest guys. In between takes, there were like seven other captive girls, so we would try and joke around, try and make light of how cold we were, how we had to go to the bathroom. We just ended up having to laugh about it; it was actually fun."

Working with a director who had been one of America's best child actors was a bonus for the young stars. "We weren't treated like kids. He really valued our opinions, and we were really treated like equals and he knew what we were dealing with, what we were going through."

Like her character of Lilly, who hates living on an isolated ranch and is seduced by the notion of moving to the city, Wood cannot imagine stepping back in time to the days of outhouses, isolation and working the land and livestock. "I would have been miserable. Somebody my age would be getting married, so it was really hard. I would have been right with her, let's get out of here."

In a film released earlier this year, Wood squeezed into scary costumes of another sort -- the low-riding jeans, cropped tops and body piercings that provoke fear in parents everywhere -- for the cautionary tale "Thirteen." Although Wood, known to TV viewers for the now-departed "Once and Again," is too shy to ask her experienced co-stars for advice, Howard did give her one tidbit.

"He told me never to be afraid to take chances." Excellent advice that she already seems to be taking.

Starchives - Evan Rachel Wood - Interview - "The Missing actresses squeeze into a period piece"
STARCHIVES
   HOME  BIO  FILMS  IMAGES  DOWNLOADS  BOOKS  MUSIC  VIDEO  AUDIO  NEWS  LINKS  STORE