Bryce Dallas Howard says actors can see movie flops ‘coming’

It would take more than a box office flop to fluster Bryce Dallas Howard. The Deep Cover star recently admitted that, as an actor who has been part of some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, she’s developed what’s basically a sixth sense when it comes to projects that won’t work out.

“You can always see it coming while you’re making it,” Howard recently told the Independent about movie flops like Argylle and The Lady in the Water. “I’ve never been shocked when something doesn’t work. But I’m just an actor — you’re there to serve a director’s vision. If a movie doesn’t turn out the way that you envisioned, you can barely feel disappointed because it’s not yours. You’re not the person who’s building the thing.”

The ability not to take said failures personally is a trait that Howard says her father, Ron Howard, struggles with.

The Jurassic World star recalled seeing her father break down emotionally when his 1992 period drama Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, bombed at the box office. Howard shared that Ron went to Clint Eastwood for advice on how to deal with such a creative low in his career.

“He said, ‘Ronnie — a career is like a season of television. You’ve got 24 episodes, some of the episodes are going to be bad, some are going to be serviceable, maybe a little forgettable, and maybe five of those episodes are going to be really strong and last,'” Howard remembered.

Fans can only hope that Howard hasn’t foreseen a box office fail for her latest film, Deep Cover.

Directed by Tom Kingsley, the action comedy follows three improv comics, led by Howard’s comedy teacher, Kat, who get recruited by Detective Sergeant DS Billings (played by Sean Bean) for a sting operation. One of those students is Orlando Bloom’s Marlon, a method actor who wants to be an A-list star like Al Pacino but lacks the skills to back up those dreams. And joining Marlon and Kat on this mission is their friend Hugh, played by Ted Lasso‘s Nick Mohammed, who happens to be an old friend of Kingsley’s in real life.

Surprisingly, for a film about improv comics, there wasn’t much improvising in the movie, except for Mohammed. Hugh and Marlon “are not brilliant at improv,” Kingsley previously told Entertainment Weekly. It’s up to Howard’s struggling-comedian-turned-teacher to keep them from getting into trouble on their mission.

“She’s trying to support her students,” Kingsley added. “She’s torn between wanting to help them do a good job and also trying to keep them all alive.”

The director notes that Howard, the last of the three main characters to be cast, adds a certain Hollywood star power to the mostly British ensemble. Still, one of his favorite days on set involved another American star close to the cast who visited while they were shooting in a corner store in Hackney.

“Hackney is not a particularly fancy area of London, and it was surreal having Bryce and Orlando in that location, but then Katy Perry chose that day to visit the set,” he revealed. “Having these massive global superstars in this tiny, rundown shop was insane to me.”

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Deep Cover will premiere on Prime Video on June 12.