Beneath Evan Rachel Wood’s all-American, uncomplicated beauty lives a semi-suppressed style rebel. “It sometimes throws people off,” says the 19-year-old. “I keep the simple blonde look because of my job, but if I weren’t acting, I’d have short black hair like Natalie Portman in The Professional.”
Wood first became known as every parent’s nightmare, the good teen headed for bad in Thirteen, and her next role is another transformation from sweet to radicalized: She’s the star of Across the Universe (opening in New York on September 14), Julie Taymor’s Beatles-based movie musical set in the sixties. As Lucy, Wood goes from high-school prom queen to Greenwich Village hippie, and hits all the era’s fashions—an experience that prompted Wood to seek out her own vintage looks. “I ended up buying a couple of sixties prom dresses and some white heels to go with them,” she says. “I’ll bust them out every now and then. It gets so boring to be confined to one thing.”
Like most teenagers, she’s blown by the whims of the moment. “The other day, I watched the old Bela Lugosi Dracula movie, and I became obsessed. I went out and completely did the twenties smoky eyes, deep lips, and crazy hair,” she says. A crazy-haired Dracula woman sounds like something Wood’s boyfriend, 38-year-old goth rocker Marilyn Manson, would like, but she says his distinctive style hasn’t directly influenced her wardrobe choices—except that she finds his lack of inhibition liberating. “When you’re with someone like him, it gives you permission to take it up a notch,” she says. “I feel I can play around a little more. For so long, I’d want to dress a certain way but wouldn’t, ’cause I’d be so worried about what people would think. Now I know that’s such a waste of time. You only live once; you’ve got to go for it.”