So Evan Rachel Wood turns 20 today, meaning that
she's just one year away from being able to take her first sip of alcohol. Ahh, who am I kidding... she probably takes absinthe body shots off of boyfriend Marilyn Manson on a semi-regular basis. (And worse.) There was a
Spin cover story on him recently that more or less intimated this, what with its author getting wasted with the subject, and then partying with all three.
To that end, it's worth pointing out that Wood is probably headed down some path of hurried maturation that could result in a messy, clamorous public and/or personal tumble somewhere down the line — if not a career flameout, then at least a very definitive boxing in. Actually, strike the word probably.
Ingénues don't date rockers 18 years their senior and live to bat their eyes and strike kewpie doll poses, either in real life or their art. When young actresses become these out-there public-performance creatures, either with drugs, drink, sex tapes or party-hearty lifestyles, it erodes their believability in disparate projects (see:
Lindsay Lohan), and thus their occupational margin for error, probably a lot more so than with guys (see: Colin Farrell).
I had a chance to interview Wood before
Thirteen and
The Missing came out in 2003 (i.e., when she was 16), and
it was clear even then that she was intelligent, precocious, but also a bit of a firecracker, and quite possibly stuck on herself. (But hey, you say, what actress isn't? Some, actually...) Since then, apart from
Thirteen, in which she played the good girl corrupted, Wood has already played shades of rebellious in
Down in the Valley and
Running with Scissors, and an icy manipulative vixen in the brazenly off-putting
Pretty Persuasion. I haven't yet seen
Across the Universe (
I'll catch it next week), but I have seen
King of California, and Wood delivers a credible performance, opposite Michael Douglas, as a world-weary high school drop-out who gets sucked into a treasure-hunting scheme by her cracked, crazily goateed father. So the good news is that
Wood has the chops to pull off plaintive, jaded, emotionally vacant and
other shades of grey, in addition to strident (which is really no great shake for any young actor worth their salt). But those aren't the required tones of most mainstream projects, and Wood still runs the risk of sanding down to oblivion any
potential soft edges.
