A Young Actress Trusts Her Instincts

Evan Rachel Wood stars in two films that opened Friday: “Little Secrets,” a family film exploring the downside of keeping secrets, and the Al Pacino comedy “Simone.” And there’s been a lot of buzz about her latest project, “Thirteen,” which she just finished filming.

Did we mention that Wood is all of 14?

But being a hot young commodity in Hollywood isn’t all glory. Wood is just exhausted after working six-day weeks on “Thirteen,” a cautionary tale about a 13-year-old girl who lives life on the wild side.

Sitting in the dining room of her family’s ranch style home in Woodland Hills, Wood looks off into space as the makeup artist finishes applying mascara and lipstick to her flawless complexion and styling her blond hair for the photo shoot accompanying this interview.

The lithe young actress shares her home with her actress mother, Sara, and an older brother, Ira. Sara Wood apologizes that the house is in disarray, but the family has house guests. As Wood patiently endures her styling session, she occasionally throws her 4-year-old dog, Garcia, a squeaky toy.

“I think she is scarily good,” says Andrew Niccol, the writer-director of “Simone,” which stars Pacino as a down-on-his-luck film director who creates a new leading lady from a computer program. Wood plays Lainey, his old-beyond-her-years daughter.

Though Wood looks nothing like Pacino or Catherine Keener, who plays her mother in the film, Niccol cast the young actress as their daughter. “She forms such a connection, I think, especially with Al Pacino, they seem biologically linked,” he says.

“I always joke she’s playing a child, but she’s the only adult in the film,” says the director.

“The great thing about Evan is that there is an intelligence behind her eyes. There is something going on. The thing about her is, I don’t know where she gets it from. She has amazing maturity.”

Finally out of the clutches of the makeup artist, Wood has moved to the sofa in the family room. Garcia jumps up on the couch to join her. Wood is now quite animated as she talks about her career, which began when she was 4.

Acting for her is instinctual. “I used to work with my mom for a really long time,” she says, hugging Garcia.

But at the ripe old age of 11, when she had her first big episode as Jessie on the now-defunct ABC series “Once and Again,” she asked her mom if she could prepare for the episode on her own. “From then on, I just trust my instincts.”

Wood is in almost every frame of “Little Secrets” as Emily, a bright, sweet young teenager who is a violin prodigy. Emily listens to the secrets of all the neighborhood’s kids for 50 cents apiece and offers them advice. Meanwhile, she is trying to come to grips with the ramifications of having kept a secret from her friends for years and deal with her mother’s late-in-life pregnancy.

The film’s director, Blair Treu, auditioned a handful of actresses before he saw Wood.

“She’s a real sweetheart,” says Treu. “Then on the actress side, she’s a real pro. I have always admired these kids who in the middle of the workday can do a very intense scene and then go off to school and then come back. She just seems to take everything in stride.”

Wood spent two months before production began trying to look like she knew how to play the violin.

Doing Her Homework

“I shot a little instructional video with a violinist of the tune she would be playing in the film,” says Treu. “We sent it along with the violin and the bow to mimic the action and the posture. We told her not to worry about the fingering so much. When she got to location in Salt Lake City, we did a little fine-tuning with an instructor to get the fingering down. But she was ready to go. She did her homework.”

“Handling the bow was difficult,” says Wood. “I didn’t think it would be that hard. I didn’t have to produce a good sound. I had to make it look really good.”

Her three seasons with “Once and Again” were cathartic. Her character, Jessie, not only had to deal with her parents’ divorce, but she also suffered from an eating disorder and fell in love with a female classmate. During the first season, Wood was still dealing with her own parents’ divorce. “It was almost kind of like therapy,” Wood says.

She says she still gets e-mail from young girls with eating disorders, telling her that her performance was “so real. It really touched them.” And lesbians have stopped her on the street to tell her that story line “ ‘meant so much to me and my partner.’ That’s why I loved doing that show, because it actually meant something. It touched so many people’s lives. It was about real life.”

Wood and her mother pick her projects. “Usually, we have two copies,” she says. “Me and my mom will read them and we’ll talk about them.”

The script for “Thirteen,” written by her 14-year-old co-star, Nikki Reed, scared her. “I put it down. I was afraid of it for a while because of the subject matter. It was so intense. I had never really done anything like that. I phoned my agent and, right then, I said, ‘I have to do this movie.’ Parents need to know this is going to go on, and this has to really scare kids into not doing this stuff.”

Wood literally grew up in the theater in Raleigh, N.C., where her parents operated a regional theater; her father still runs the company. “I was always around actors,” she says. “Acting is something I always assumed I would do.”

She made her debut at 4 in “Briar Patch,” a musical her father wrote. “Then I actually toured with one of my dad’s play for years. It was his version of ‘A Christmas Carol.’ ”

Wood was flown out to Los Angeles at age 5 to audition for “Interview With the Vampire.” Though she didn’t get the role in the Tom Cruise film, she began getting episodic work in TV and made her film debut opposite Kevin Bacon in the 1998 drama “Digging to China.” She and her mother and brother finally moved to Los Angeles in 1999.

When she’s not working, she hangs out with her friends, most of whom are in the industry. She has a black belt in karate but hasn’t had time to practice the sport because of her hectic schedule. Still, she says, “I take voice lessons every Saturday.”

Wood has been home-schooled for the last four years. “North Carolina schools were great,” she says, “but once I moved out here, I had a really bad experience. The kids were fine but the teachers were a nightmare. It was terrible.”

Needless to say, she hasn’t made up her mind yet about college. “I am not quite there yet,” she says, hugging Garcia.