Evan Rachel Wood: Bisexuality and queer visibility
While Evan Rachel Wood came out as a bisexual on Twitter in 2012, it was during an interview with Esquire the year before that she spoke about having feelings for both guys and girls.
“I was always into very androgynous things. Guys, girls… I’m into androgyny in general,” Wood explained in 2011.
However, so many celebrities back then were associating themselves with the word bisexuality, it was hard to tell who was telling the truth.
Then came Wood’s male celebrity relationships and a marriage, which convinced people her prior declarations were just for publicity. Still, Wood insisted her bisexuality every time she was asked.
Recently, Wood is in the LGBT radar again when she received the Human Rights Campaign’s Visibility Award. This time, the 29-year old actress has finally been taken her seriously as a voice of bisexuality.
Evan Rachel Wood, the young tomboy
During her speech at the HRC North Carolina Gala, Wood described herself as “the tomboy from Raleigh.”
Wood came from a family of actors who hailed from North Carolina. Her mother, Sara Lynn Moore is an actress, director and acting coach while her father is an actor, singer, theatre director and playwright.
Meanwhile, her brother is an actor and her aunt was a production designer in Hollywood.
Her father later became the executive director of Theatre in the Park, a local regional theatre where Wood and brothers were exposed to acting.
When her parents divorced, she and her mother moved to Los Angeles where she was home-schooled and graduated high school at age 15.
Evan Rachel Wood as an actress
In 1994, Wood appeared in a couple of made-for-television films and played roles in American Gothic, Profiler and Once and Again.
Digging to China was her first film, which won the Children’s Jury Award at the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival.
It was in this film she knew she would be an actress forever.
Later on, she was nominated for Best Leading Young Actress at the Young Artist Awards for her role as the 14-year concert violinist Blair Treu.
Evan Rachel Wood’s breakthrough
She then gave a critically-acclaimed performance in Thirteen, where she was nominated for both a Golden Globes for Best Actress and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
She had roles in Simone The Missing, The Upside of Anger, Pretty Persuasion, Down in the Valley, Running with Scissors, King of California, Across the Universe, The Life Before her Eyes, The Wrestler, and Whatever Works.
Furthermore, she got roles in a number of TV series like Mildred Pierce and True Blood. She currently stars in the SF series, Westworld.
In all these, her performance was always praised.
Evan Rachel Wood’s bisexuality
Wood has had numerous celebrity relationships– all male– such as Marilyn Manson and Jamie Bell. She would marry and have a child with them. Right now, she’s engaged to Zach Villa.
Yet early this February, she was awarded by the HRC for being the voice and face of bisexuality.
During the HRC gala event, She gave an impassioned speech about the sufferings of not knowing why she found both guys and girls beautiful.
“Because of the voices I listened to, because of the people I identified with, the films I had watched, the music I had heard– because of words like ‘bisexual’ and the door that it opened – I’m still here,” she said.
More importantly, Wood talked of hope and having a voice in a time when bisexuals don’t have a voice or a face to represent them.