Evan Rachel Wood fighting the good fight

When Evan Rachel Wood needs a jolt of confidence, she puts on a certain playlist, a compendium of feminist anthems and feisty classics — I Will Survive, These Boots Are Made for Walking, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, some head-whipping grunge and hip-hop.

It was piping through her house here one chilly afternoon last month. Wood, the actress and musician, had just put herself through an emotional wringer: She testified before Congress, in unflinching terms, about being a survivor of sexual violence, then jetted to Los Angeles to perform songs by David Bowie, her musical idol, with his bandmates. It was a cross-country head-snap. Now she was welding herself back together.

“My life is definitely going places I did not foresee,” she said, leaning over her kitchen counter, as Sia’s Unstoppable played in the background. “But I’m going with it. It doesn’t feel like a choice at this point. This is just what I need to do.”

Her trajectory is even more remarkable when you consider how much it overlaps, thematically, with the storyline of Dolores, her character on the HBO series Westworld. On that sci-fi drama, set in a Western theme park where visitors can act out their most depraved fantasies with humanlike robot “hosts,” Dolores is an innocent and much-abused host who slowly awakens to the darkness of what has befallen her, and then fights her way out.

A critical darling when it aired in 2016, Westworld had the most-watched debut season of any HBO series, and anticipation for its new season, which begins April 24 in the UAE, is high.

In a starry ensemble that included Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris and Jeffrey Wright, it was the women, like Wood and Thandie Newton, as a host madam who’s newly conscious of her reality, that were riveting, in part for how they endured — and inflicted — violence.

The show, Wood said, “completely transformed my entire life,” not because it catapulted her career — although it did — but because playing Dolores forced her to drill into her own struggles. “Her journey mirrored so much of what I had been through and what I was going through,” she said. “It gave me a strength that I did not know I had.”

For Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the married co-creators of Westworld, Wood was first an exceedingly “protean” actor, as Nolan said in a joint phone interview. Wood, 30, has been in front of the camera since childhood, graduating from volatile adolescents in movies like Thirteen to a vampire queen on True Blood.

They cast her knowing she could pull off the lightning shifts that Dolores makes in Season 2, which finds her exacting sweet revenge even as she weighs its costs.

“With Evan’s character, I wanted to explore a hero who has flaws and had a history that was trauma and sadness, but who could overcome that,” said Joy, a writer, producer and director of the series with her husband. “To me, that’s an inspiring story, and a story that can teach. And Evan, because she is so strong and she is that person, was able to unleash even more of that strength than I imagined. Even the aspects of her performance where she’s vulnerable, or when she makes a mistake, you’re internalising that even heroes falter. It’s the kind of hero I wish I had had growing up.”

Wood did not necessarily feel heroic when she travelled to Washington — her second time there, after the 2017 Women’s March — to testify before a House judiciary committee in February. “I shook for days” beforehand, she said. She feared she would be judged for what happened to her.

“I couldn’t even believe I was about to say these words aloud, that I probably have only said out loud to three people.”

That somebody with her background — “I’ve had practice baring my soul in intense, surreal situations; it’s like what I do for a living” — was still terrified made her even more determined to go, to represent those who couldn’t.

She was invited to appear by Amanda Nguyen, founder of Rise, an advocacy organisation for rape survivors. They were endorsing the Survivor’s Bill of Rights, 2016 legislation that amended the federal criminal code to give survivors of sexual assault the right to a free medical exam and to have rape kits be preserved for as long as 20 years, among other changes. (The hearing examined the law; its supporters are hoping to get a version passed in each state, because most rape cases are tried on the state level.)

A survivor

Wood called herself a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, and described being raped twice, about a decade ago, first by an abusive partner, then by a man in the storage closet of a bar.

“Being abused and raped previously made it easier for me to be raped again, not the other way around,” she said. She has aligned herself with these causes before, but never in such personal terms. She spoke of suffering from “depression, addiction, agoraphobia, night terrors” and attempting suicide; eventually, she was given a diagnosis of long-term PTSD. The assaults left her with “a mental scar that I feel, every day,” she said. She delivered her testimony in a gripping voice and broke down in tears afterward.

She moved to Nashville a few years ago, seeking a quieter place to raise her son, now 4 1/2 years old, she had with her ex-husband, actor Jamie Bell. Save for an old friend turned writing partner, she knew few people there, and gets around without much fanfare, helped by a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and a choppy bob. (Her long Westworld hair is a wig.)

Would she have been able to testify without the show? “I hadn’t even cried about my experiences until after Westworld,” she said. Her defence mechanism was to go numb and power through. “And I didn’t even realise that until I’d done Westworld.” When she finally gave herself permission to cry, “it was like the floodgates opened,” she added. “It just felt like an exorcism; it was so painful but so healing.”

Revealing her ordeal, she felt freer, she said, comparing it to coming out as bisexual in 2011. “Everyone was like, ‘Don’t do it!’” she mock-yelled. “And I was like, I have to, it’s me, and it’s unhealthy if I live in a way that’s not authentic.”

Wood’s testimony, coupled with the personal revelations and shifts of the #MeToo movement, made a difference, said Nguyen, who helped draft the original bill. “Storytelling is so important in convincing people about policy change,” she said. “I know that that hearing moved the needle for progress.”

In between Seasons 1 and 2 of Westworld, Wood filmed an indie drama, Allure, out now, in which she plays the gaslighting abuser of a teenage girl.

It was not fun to play, she said, but a painful story she felt needed to be told. “If you’re going to be famous, for me it has to mean something, or be used for something, because otherwise it just freaks me out,” she said. The playlist we’d been listening to all day — her soundtrack for the revolution — is called “Invincible,” she said.

In a flannel shirt, dark jeans and cowboy boots embossed with stars, she was unguarded and casual, peppering the conversation with “Dude!” and the click, every now and then, of a fidget cube, to channel her energy. Her house is cosy but feels half-lived in — she’s still in Los Angeles often. Westworld shoots in the Utah desert; to lighten the mood on set, she and her co-star James Marsden, as a “host” gunfighter, run their lines as Veronica Corningstone and Ron Burgundy, from Anchorman. (She puts on her coaching voice; he’s dense. It works.) But Dolores’ transformation, in Season 2, left Wood unnerved.

“I’ve worked for a very long time to not be angry and vengeful,” she said, “so it was hard to take pleasure in that, even though I knew that the character had definitely earned it.”

Wood’s mission is always to turn her trauma into some other force. Before she went to Congress, she had her aura read at a Nashville shop.

It told her some of her energy was blocked, that she needed to get something out. Now, a week afterward, we went back, to see if anything had changed.

She was still glowing lavender — “wonderful storytellers, writers and artists,” the description said. “They have the talent to visualise and describe magical, mystical worlds.” But where before her emotional chart looked like a jagged mountain range, now it was flat, calm. “Speaking your truth!” she said.

Her hope was that — especially post #MeToo — Westworld would do for others what Dolores did for her: help them to feel powerful, and be heard. “Everything you want is on the other side of fear,” she said.

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Don’t miss it!

‘Westworld’ screens in the UAE on OSN First HD on April 23 at midnight