Cap D'Antibes, France — It's hard to imagine Opie Taylor's daughter in an unnerving sex scene. Almost as hard as it was for
Bryce Dallas Howard to imagine herself doing it.
The 24-year-old actress — whose father, director Ron Howard, played two of TV's most wholesome characters, Opie in "The Andy Griffith Show" and Richie Cunningham on "Happy Days" — bares it all in Lars von Trier's Cannes Film Festival entry "Manderlay."
"I'm a bit of a prude," Howard said, describing her reticence over the scene, a strange combination of violent passion and detached lovelessness between her character and a former slave played by Isaach De Bankole.
"I coped with doing it because I trusted and continue to trust what Lars does," Howard said. "I felt like it was a really important scene, and this film is bigger than who I am and my own kind of ego and my own prudishness."
The film is the second in von Trier's trilogy about America, with Howard taking over the role originated by
Nicole Kidman in "Dogville."
In "Manderlay," Grace, her gangster father and their entourage discover an Alabama plantation where whites still own black slaves, 70 years after the Civil War. Grace plays emancipator in a well-intentioned though naive attempt to build a democratic community.
In terror over her sex scene "I was kind of curled up in a fetal position, and Lars said, 'Well, I got Grace's pain in that take,'" Howard said, laughing."