Bryce Dallas Howard opens up about her childhood trauma with safety on film sets

June 19, 2025

Peter Mountain

Bryce Dallas Howard is opening up about the childhood trauma that keeps safety front of her mind while on film sets.

While promoting her new film, Deep Cover, Howard’s co-stars Orlando Bloom and Nick Mohammed said the actress was “always looking out for our safety and well-being” while on set.

When asked why that was a priority, Howard said, “Interestingly enough, it came from childhood trauma.”

“Everybody really does their best to make sure that it’s safe. But every once in a while, something happens. And so there have been a handful of days where I was there, where things have happened, when I was young,” Howard said.

Those incidents have caused her to “obsessively think about, ‘OK, what could have been different?'” Howard said.

She has questions about specific instances she remembers from sets of the past.

“What fell apart that that person ended up in the ocean? What fell apart that that chair fell on their head from three stories above?” Howard said. “What went wrong in terms of infrastructure? Because movie making is a military infrastructure.”

Howard says that infrastructure includes “a hierarchy where there’s a general at top and everyone else are kind of soldiers. And if you’re told to do something, you do it and you don’t question it. And that is when safety becomes an issue.”

“I am definitely a little hypervigilant about that stuff,” Howard said.

How did that translate on the set of Deep Cover?

“Bryce has just always got health and safety right at the forefront of her mind,” Mohammed said. “There were times when we were doing night shoots where Bryce is literally shoveling gravel for the crew to make sure they don’t slip on the surface, which is absolutely fine, by the way. Hypervigilant and in the most brilliant possible way.”