True Blood’s Evan Rachel Wood reveals a lot about herself to Esquire magazine including her bi-sexuality, her plans for her death and her many tattoos. Below is a portion of the interview she did with them which is published in the May issue of the magazine:
Evan Rachel Wood is twenty-three years old, in fine health, as radiant as her pallor will allow, and newly coiffed like Veronica Lake. She says she doesn’t do drugs, recently quit smoking, and doesn’t drink much. But here on a sunny day in a bar in downtown Manhattan she’d really like to talk about her death. She’s already written a will, she says. And she’s made plans to have her ashes dispersed across the world, including in her native Raleigh — in a field next to the theater run by her father — and Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens, which she used to visit with her onetime boyfriend, the actor Jamie Bell. The song playing at her funeral will be Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”
She’s consecrated both the Floyd song and the ex-boyfriend in ink, as tattoos: a diamond on her right ankle and a “J” on her left ankle. She has nine tattoos in total. But you can’t see them during her extended, haunting nude scene in HBO’s Mildred Pierce; they’re covered in makeup. It wouldn’t have made narrative sense for her character — a borderline-sociopathic opera singer in the thirties — to have a Shel Silverstein drawing of a candle on her back. Or the word unless, from Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, on her ribs. (The Edgar Allan Poe verse on her back just below her neck was chronologically plausible but covered up anyway.)
Wood must realize she has a reputation, and not merely for being among the most gifted actresses of her generation. “I don’t know!” she says, laughing. “I’m constantly changing, I’m constantly growing. I think I’m a little controversial? … I just try and keep some mystery, so hopefully people can’t really put their finger on it.”
It might be the tattoos. It might be her on-again, off-again, now-off relationship with Marilyn Manson. It might be her filmography — from Thirteen to The Wrestler to Mildred Pierce — which amounts to one long crisis of adolescence. Watch any of her films, including Robert Redford’s historical drama, The Conspirator (out now): They’re all master classes in the art of crying. She dismisses this skill as “part of the job description,” like a basketball player’s ability to sink free throws. When shooting The Life Before Her Eyes, her director once dared her to shed a single tear out of a single eye as soon as he called “Action.” She obliged, on cue. A half-court buzzer-beater.
“I was a teenager in Hollywood with a divorced family — there’s gonna be pain there,” she says. “I’ve got plenty to draw from.”
Read more: esquire.com
