‘One Nightstand’ With Bryce Dallas Howard

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

It’s a Monday afternoon in downtown New York and Bryce Dallas Howard is dropping wisdom left and right. “The honest truth — this is so weird — but I try to live a slightly embarrassing life,” she says, grinning. “It's OK to not be the cool person in the room. It's OK to be the overly enthusiastic person. It's all right. If you feel embarrassed, that's an OK feeling.”

We’re discussing one of Howard’s five favorite books, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, which explores how fear can get in the way of creative work. “I think that fear and embarrassment are very close. Embarrassment is more dangerous because fear you can live with, but if you start to feel embarrassed by something, you shut down in a way that's very difficult to recover from.”

With Howard’s own fears firmly in check, her creative output is soaring. Her new movie, Pets, available on Disney+, is a documentary that explores the intimate relationship between animals and their carers. It’s Howard’s second directorial effort; her debut, Dads, an exploration of contemporary fatherhood, came out in 2020. “We have a Greek chorus of children who I interviewed, and then we share these stories around the world of what I call ‘mutual rescue,’” she says, though there’s plenty of levity too. “One of my favorite things to do ever — and this has been the case for a long, long time — is to watch pet videos online.”

While Howard began her career as an actor, appearing in As You Like It, The Help, and the Jurassic World trilogy, this pivot toward documentary filmmaking is intentional, and reflects a preference that shows up in her literary choices, too. “As I've gotten older, I've noticed that I don't really read fiction,” she says. “I don't want to say I prefer documentaries, but that's what I go to. I think, in some ways, nothing beats real life.”

One such story of real-life mayhem, Just Kids by Patti Smith, makes Howard’s list of all-time favorite books. “I was completely swept away by this book because I went to NYU and I met my husband at NYU and so many of my closest friends there — so that kind of life of being in Greenwich Village and young artists and people seeking their identity and making mistakes and making good choices,” she says, trailing off. “Also Patti Smith... There's no hubris. There's no envy. There's no pretense. It's just very genuine, and it makes the storytelling incredibly vivid.”

Howard’s other favorite memoir — The Boys by Ron Howard and Clint Howard — tells a story that’s even closer to home. Written by her father, Ron, and uncle, Clint, it tells the story of their family’s rise in Hollywood as “sophisticated hicks” from Oklahoma. “Both of my grandparents were actors, but they weren't movie star actors. They were really working actors,” she says. The book recounts the story of her father’s career, from his acting appearances in The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days to his transition to an Academy Award-winning director, though it primarily focuses on his relationship with his brother, father, and mother. “It has been this relationship that I've watched my entire life, these brothers who are very different, who love each other so devoutly, and their love is such a reflection of what my grandparents created for them.”

The theme of creative work surfaces in another of Howard’s top reads: Daily Rituals: Women At Work by Mason Currey. “I'm obsessed with this book. I read this before bed. I read this when I'm in the restroom, when I just want to do something that is going to [make me] feel swept away,” she says. “It is so fascinating because you see just the struggle of the balance. That every human, regardless of gender, every human has to juggle things.”

This juggling is another theme in her fifth book, Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo. “Marie has a program that I took 10 years ago, and ongoingly, if you buy it, you get to be re-enrolled every year, and I re-roll every year and go through the curriculum. It's called B-School. It's an online business school,” she says. “She's a great communicator, and everything that she says makes a lot of sense.”

Forleo makes the case for writing down goals, citing data that shows people are 42% more likely to achieve their goals when they’ve put pen to paper. For Howard, this is a kind of manifestation. “My husband was like, ‘I don't know if I believe in that,’” she says of their discussion on the topic. “And I was like, ‘Oh, no, no, don't worry. It's not something to believe in. It's just a fact.’ And he was like, ‘What do you mean? It's just a fact?’ And I was like, ‘Well, if you have a goal and you write it down, are you more or less likely to achieve that goal?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, more likely.’ And I was like, ‘So that's how manifestation works.’”