Trying to Turn a Trauma Into a Positive
NASHVILLE, Tennessee — When Evan Rachel Wood needs a jolt of confidence, she puts on a certain playlist, a compendium of feminist anthems and feisty classics — “I Will Survive,” “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, some grunge and hip-hop. It was piping through her house here one day last month.
Ms. Wood, the actress and musician, had just put herself through an emotional wringer: She testified before the United States Congress, in unflinching terms, about being a survivor of sexual violence, then jetted to Los Angeles to perform songs by David Bowie, her musical idol, with his bandmates. “My life is definitely going places I did not foresee,” she said. “But I’m going with it. It doesn’t feel like a choice at this point. This is just what I need to do.”
Her trajectory is even more remarkable when you consider how much it overlaps, thematically, with the story line of Dolores, her character on the HBO series “Westworld.” On that sci-fi drama, set in a Western theme park where visitors can act out their most depraved fanta- sies with humanlike robot “hosts,” Dolores is an innocent and muchabused host who slowly awakens to the darkness of what has befallen her, and then fights her way out.
A critical darling when it aired in 2016, “Westworld” had the mostwatched debut season of any HBO series, and anticipation for its new season, which begins April 22, is high. In a starry ensemble that included Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris and Jeffrey Wright, it was the women, like Ms. Wood and Thandie Newton, as a host madam who’s newly conscious of her reality, that were riveting, in part for how they endured — and inflicted — violence.
The show, Ms. Wood said, “completely transformed my entire life,” not because it catapulted her career — although it did — but because playing Dolores forced her to drill into her own struggles. “Her journey mirrored so much of what I had been through and what I was going through,” she said. “It gave me a strength that I did not know I had.”
For Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the married co- creators of “Westworld,” Ms. Wood was first an exceedingly “protean” actor, as Mr. Nolan said. Ms. Wood, 30, has been in front of the camera since childhood, graduating from volatile adolescents in movies like “Thirteen” to a vampire queen on “True Blood.”
“With Evan’s character, I wanted to explore a hero who has flaws and had a history that was trauma and sadness, but who could overcome that,” Ms. Joy said. “It’s the kind of hero I wish I had had growing up”
Ms. Wood did not feel heroic when she traveled to Washington to testify. “I shook for days” beforehand, she said. She feared she would be judged for what happened to her. “I couldn’t even believe I was about to say these words aloud, that I probably have only said out loud to three people.”
Ms. Wood called herself a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, and described being raped twice, about a decade ago, first by an abusive partner, then by a man in a bar. She spoke of suffering from “depression, addiction, agoraphobia, night terrors” and attempting suicide; eventually, she was given a diagnosis of longterm PTSD. The assaults left her with “a mental scar that I feel, every day,” she said. She delivered her testimony in a gripping voice and broke down in tears afterward.
Would she have been able to testify without the show?
“I hadn’t even cried about my experiences until after ‘ Westworld,’ ” she said. When she finally gave herself permission to cry, “it was like the floodgates opened,” she added. “It just felt like an exorcism; it was so painful but so healing.”
Revealing her ordeal, she felt freer, she said, comparing it to coming out as bisexual in 2011.
Twenty-four hours after she testified, Ms. Wood was in Los Angeles,
A star of HBO’s ‘Westworld’ testifies that she was raped.
about to perform at a touring Bowie tribute. She has a lightning bolt tattoo, from Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane” album cover, and songs like “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” were her beacon. “I used to just put that on when I was at my lowest points and just wait for him to scream, ‘ You’re not alone!’ And that would get me through another night,” she said.
In between Seasons 1 and 2 of “Westworld,” Ms. Wood filmed an indie drama, “Allure,” out now, in which she plays the abuser of a teenage girl. It was not fun to play, but was a story she felt needed to be told.
She expressed hope that “Westworld” would do for others what Dolores did for her: help them to feel powerful, and be heard. “Everything you want is on the other side of fear,” she said.