While many of us out here in the fandom are hoping that she soon gets a bite at the cherry of a big screen Star Wars adventure, Bryce Dallas Howard is keeping herself plenty busy with her directing and acting career as she discusses her role in the freshly released Deep Cover on Amazon Prime and her time in the galaxy far, far away.
At the end of a day of press for her new Prime Video comedy Deep Cover, Howard’s enthusiasm doesn’t seem to be flagging. She careens between incredibly animated excitability – hand gesticulations, laughter, impressions – and more sober business-speak, and while I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that people with red hair age far better than anyone else, I’m struck by the fact that Howard still looks about 25. She’s actually 44, and I’m slightly floored when she casually mentions that her son – she has two children, Theo and Beatrice, with the actor Seth Gabel – graduated from high school just a few days earlier.
We’re talking about violence because Deep Cover is unexpectedly full of it. It revolves around three struggling, London-based improv comedians (Howard, Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed and a revelatory Orlando Bloom) who are recruited by Sean Bean’s police detective to go undercover and bust low-stakes criminal operations – apparently, actual coppers aren’t too great with on-the-spot ad-libbing. The restless trio hesitantly say yes, only for the operations to become increasingly bloody and labyrinthian, the group ending up in a tangle with kingpins played by Ian McShane and Paddy Considine. It’s entirely ridiculous, but also very funny and British, full of slightly Gervaisian cringe comedy and elaborate comic set pieces involving corpses and brain splatter. As if she hadn’t driven it home enough already, Howard absolutely loves the morbid.
