Bryce Dallas Howard says director insulted Ron Howard to piss her off: ‘Your father’s a terrible filmmaker’

Bryce Dallas Howard is reflecting on her collaboration with a contentious filmmaker.

The Jurassic World star recalled working with polarizing Danish director Lars von Trier on the 2005 drama Manderlay in a new interview with the British outlet The Times. 

Howard said that as soon as she arrived in Norway to begin filming the project, the director began talking smack about her dad, Ron Howard, in order to get under her skin. “He started insulting me: ‘Your father’s a terrible filmmaker,'” she remembered von Trier saying. “I went, ‘Lars, what are you trying to see?’ and he said, ‘Your angry face. I don’t know what it looks like.'”

Howard claimed that von Trier splashed a glass of water in her face after that exchange. “So I threw a glass of water in his face,” she said. “He goes, ‘Why did you do that?’ and got up and left.”

Representatives for von Trier did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly‘s request for comment.

Despite the presumed aggression of the interaction, Howard said that she was somewhat amused by the encounter. “That was my introduction to the Lars von Trier experience, but it wasn’t like I went to my room and cried or anything,” she said. “I was sort of delighted by it.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Howard explained how her connection with her acclaimed father has impacted her ability to find acting work. “I happen to be in a situation where there are multiple layers of privilege,” she said, noting that Ron Howard’s parents, Rance and Jean Speegle Howard, were also actors. “So I got to have access in a way that, even if you were born into it, most people wouldn’t.

The actress reiterated that her family has been a boon for her Hollywood trajectory. “At the beginning of my career people would ask — and I was always so shocked by this — ‘Do you feel it’s been a disadvantage?” she recalled.’ “And I was like, ‘Disadvantage?’ When you’re an actor, you need to capture a casting director or director’s attention, but when you’re someone who’s related to someone else, there’s an inherent curiosity there.”

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Howard also shared her reaction to watching her dad return to acting on Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Studio, in which the child-star-turned-director played a grumpier version of himself. “I was nervous for him. They shoot everything as a one-er [one-shot take] and you can’t really fumble-bumble anything, but he was so dialled in,” the actress said of Ron Howard. “It was really fun being behind the monitor and hearing Evan and Seth get so excited. It just made me really proud of him.”