CONFIDENTIAL
BLOCKBUSTER ACTRESS Bryce Dallas Howard is riding high in Hollywood, but she has unfinished business in New York — and it involves hitting the books. The “Jurassic World” star and Broadway veteran (photo) tells Confidential she’s determined to finish her degree at New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts, which she left after three years in 2003 to take stage acting roles. The 35-year-old daughter of director Ron Howard — who was her date to Saturday’s BAFTA Tea Party in L.A. — is close to finishing her schoolwork, and is hotly anticipating attending graduation, she says. “I’m a heartbeat away from completing it,” said Howard, who spoke of her educational drive while attending the second annual Moët & Chandon Moment Film Festival in Los Angeles, where she served as a judge. “I haven’t been at school since then — and actually all that time I’ve been chipping away at my degree. The irony of it all is that I was a drama major, and now I’ve done so much of it in sociology that I’m probably going to end up being a sociology major.”
She has no regrets about leaving school when she did, says Howard, whose subsequent stage roles included Rosalind in “As You Like It” at the Public Theater — a turn that led to her breakout film debut in the thriller “The Village,” after director M. Night
Shyamalan caught her performance.
“That was the right thing to do at that time and I do feel good about it,” said Howard. “I was very focused on school and was auditioning simultaneously — when I eventually got a job that was my focus.”
Before she dons a cap and gown, Howard will film the sequel to the mega-hit “Jurassic World,” which has grossed over $1.6 billion worldwide. And she’s promising fans complications in the romance between her character Claire Dearing and Chris
Pratt’s Owen Grady. “We weren’t supposed to kiss in the first film — that was something we did spontaneously on an alt take,” Howard said. “And when we watched the movie we were surprised, as we thought they were more adversarial. Now where they go from here, we need to answer these questions — and we will discover as we go.”