Bryce Dallas Howard Bares It All

Bryce Dallas Howard has lied, manipulated and created complicated subterfuges to get what she wants ‑- and that's in real life, not on the big screen. Does that make the daughter of Ron Howard a scoundrel?

Of course not. The Opie look-alike, who turns 25 in March, is as sweet and innocent as you would expect from the daughter of the King of Nice. She wasn't raised in Hollywood, although she lives there now, and she has little to do with her club-hopping contemporaries who make headlines with eating disorders, arrests and shotgun engagements.

"Pretty boring," she laughs, during a day of interviews in a Midtown Manhattan hotel to promote her new film, Manderlay, from Danish director Lars von Trier.

That makes it all the more shocking when she strips nude in the movie, which is an intellectual treatise on racism that is so highly stylized that there are no sets or locations ‑- just actors on a bare soundstage pretending there are walls and doors.

Howard's character, Grace, is a naive girl on the run with her gangster father who innocently tries to help a group of African-Americans who are still held in slavery in the 1930s. She gets tied up in their drama as she tries to convert their plantation to a co-op, and she ends up in love with one of the former slaves.