Evan Rachel Wood has opened up about her process when reading through scripts, admitting that, when the time is right, she will ask directors to change the genders of characters she wants to play.
“I remembered reading something that Jodie Foster said,” Wood recalled to me. “She was at a place in her career where she read scripts for both men and women.”
“And if it was written for a man and she liked it she would approach them and ask them to gender swap it. I thought, ‘I want to be at a place where I was like that’.”
While Wood wasn’t the one to suggest it, she admitted that was exactly what happened with her character in “Allure,” which was released earlier this year.
“That’s what the directors did with this,” Wood recalled. “The film wasn’t going where they wanted with a man, someone suggested it, and they were like, ’That’s really interesting. Because that story hasn’t been told and raises new questions’.”
Wood’s pursuit to tell new stories and bring fresh, original female characters to television and films has also extended to her writing.
“I think a lot of the creative people in the industry aren’t seeing the projects that they want to see made or want to be a part of, so a lot of people have taken things into their own hands,” Woods explained.
“I just started to get fed up, and started to write the things that I wanted to see and started to send them out to actresses.”
The response that she got was hugely encouraging, too. “And I wasn’t crazy. The main response I get from actresses is, ‘Thank you. Thank you for writing this kind of character.’ We don’t see these movies or characters.”
Evan Rachel Wood will hopefully be doing that in the near future, because in March, 2017, it was announced that she had written and would be directing a road-trip movie starring Jenny Slate, Alison Pill and Tony winner Cynthia Erivo.
Unfortunately we’re still not sure when the film is going to be released, but hopefully it will be in the very near future.
