Evan Rachel Wood Grows Up

The actress is such a muse to directors that last year, she received the ultimate prize for a young woman in Hollywood—a handwritten letter from Woody Allen, asking her to be in his next project, Whatever Works. “It was a very humble letter,” she recalls. “ He wrote, ‘I think you’d be really great in this character, if you don’t like the script it’s OK, we’ll do something else’ That made me laugh—if I don’t like the script? It was Woody! I grew up with my film-geek mom going, ‘Sit. This is Annie Hall, this is Diane Keaton, this acting, this is Hannah and Her Sisters,’ so it was a huge deal.”

Whatever Works hits theaters this weekend, and shows a different side of Wood than many have seen—she’s a goofy ham, playing Melodie St. Ann Celestine, a dopey blonde from the Deep South—Wood was raised in North Carolina—who has come to New York City to escape her yokel roots. She is taken in off the street by Larry David’s character, elder divorced physicist Boris Yellnikoff, and together they form first a bond of friendship, and later, of marriage. The relationship is charming, and though the film has its flaws, Wood and David’s quirky chemistry lends Whatever Works the air of the great Allen-Keaton movies of the past. And no, Wood and David (40 years apart) do not have a sex scene. “It’s actually a really sweet, innocent relationship that the two of them have. If you’re going to see the film for that,” she says, “You’re going to be disappointed.”

Though it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to imagine Wood in a love scene with an older man—her longtime boyfriend (now her ex), shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, is 19 years her senior. “I was raised thinking that a relationship like that was just completely wrong,” she says. “But I can’t choose who I fall in love with, and I’m not going to not do something that makes me happy just because people disapprove. It seemed natural to us and that was all that mattered.”

Many raised their eyebrows when Wood and Manson started dating—not because she was with a strange, Goth-looking man, but because she began to dress more ostentatiously herself; she started walking red carpets in dark makeup and Victorian baubles and bows, and dyed her hair flame red. Some tabloids started to speculate that Manson was controlling Wood—creating her in his own image—but she points out that she was a Goth chick all along, and that Manson actually freed her to be herself and gave her the courage to withstand the public scrutiny. “It felt like it happened overnight to other people, but if you knew me—it didn’t come as a shock,” she says. “I had dressed like that on my own—I would want to do something really dark or vintage or over-the-top for an award show, but my people would be like, ‘It makes you look old, let’s keep you young and fresh and light and fluffy.” And I hadn’t gotten my voice yet so I was just like, ‘OK, you’re right, I suck, I’ll wear what you say.’ But then I met [Marilyn], and I found somebody who appreciated all those things about me that I thought were wrong. He liked the music I liked, the way I dressed, the people I hung out with.”