'Once' changed her again and again

By NANCY CHURNIN

When Evan Rachel Wood appeared in the pilot for Once and Again, she was just 11 and had no idea the show would change her life.

Not that it was the young actress's first break: Growing up behind the scenes at a theater her father still runs in North Carolina, she made her stage debut at age 4 as a bunny. Her first TV movie role, in Death in Small Doses, came when she was 5.

She's also been featured in Practical Magic and Digging to China, but her role as Jessie in Once and Again had a profound effect on her vision of what she wants to accomplish as an actress. The series about a complicated blended family has aired for three critically acclaimed, ratings-challenged years; it was cancelled last week. The final episode will be broadcast Monday at 9 p.m. on WFAA-TV (Channel 8).

Evan, 14, says the grateful response from fans who identify with Jessie often made her feel she was helping others. "I have received so many letters from teens and from adults who say they would have liked to have seen something like this when they were teens," she says from Los Angeles, where she lives with her mother and one of her older brothers.

"I like to deal with real issues, things that people are really going through. I feel that that's why I'm an actor--to help guide people through life, to affect them in some way."

Playing a girl whose parents divorce has sometimes been like therapy for her, she says. "In the first season, when I was dealing with my own parents being separated, I had an episode about Jessie finding out that her parents were getting divorced. I remember one time I could not stop crying, because it hit really close to home.

"Sometimes it can be a little difficult having to deal with knowing that your parents don't love each other anymore, knowing that you won't have that normal family again, you'll never have that so-called perfect life."

Painful as it was, she says, playing those scenes helped her accept changes in her life.

"That's another good thing about acting," she says. "You're in an environment where you can say things you want to say and scream and cry and get out your own feelings. It's helped me."

Her most recent acting challenge was playing Jessie as the character comes to terms with her feelings for another girl. That, she says, wasn't as hard as an earlier assignment--playing Jessie as an anorexic.

"I almost didn't want to do the anorexic story line because I was so skinny. I felt a little insulted that they [the writers] decided to make me anorexic. But then I got over it and thought it was a great story."

In contrast, she says, the love story was easy because she just played it as someone with a crush and didn't focus on it being a crush on a person of the same sex.

Evan says she hopes the show opens the eyes of parents to the secret lives of kids.

"I guess the message is you shouldn't be too hard on your kids, because you don't always know what they're going through."

She says she feels very close to the other cast members, which makes the cancellation especially difficult. She refers to Shane West, who plays Jessie's brother Eli, as her brother, and Susanna Thompson, who plays her mother, as a second mother.

She's upset about the cancellation, she adds, not just for her own sake, but because she feels Once and Again was the only show on television that focused on what people really go through every day.

Yet the philosophy of the show, with its insights on the losses and imperfections of life, has, ironically, helped her to deal with the pain of its demise. "It's another one of those things I can't hold on to, although I want to," she says. "I have to let it go." __ Dallas Morning News 4/9/02

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