In interviews in 2020 with director Berg, a year before she would name Manson publicly as her alleged abuser, Wood exorcises horror stories with a palpable mixture of relief, fear, and determination. “Phoenix Rising” began filming in 2019 as Wood banded together with other survivors of domestic violence to push for changing the statute of limitations on cases like theirs in California and beyond. It also grapples with Manson’s purposefully hyperbolic persona, “ironic” interest in Nazi paraphernalia, and his own fraught childhood, though always from Wood’s perspective.

This episode then weaves between Wood’s recollections of her past with Manson as a frightened teen and her present as a woman sifting through her own experience, and the eerily similar experience of others, for clues. The first, which debuted Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, begins with Wood and her family detailing her upbringing, her account of becoming Hollywood’s go-to “troubled teen” actor, and how she was primed to be swept up in the alluring web of someone like Manson. And when they do commit to unpacking the Manson allegations, neither Wood nor “Phoenix Rising” holds back.ĭirected by Amy Berg, “Phoenix Rising” will premiere later this year on HBO in two parts. Even before the documentary delves into Wood’s accounts of suffering horrifying abuse at the hands of Marilyn Manson, the provocative rock star whom she dated as a teenager, “Phoenix Rising” is a startlingly vulnerable account of Wood’s life as a child actor, a confused kid processing trauma, and a young woman forced to mature far before she was ready. And so Wood made the conscious choice to take hold of her own narrative for “ Phoenix Rising,” the new documentary about her life that acts as a sharp corrective to how she’s seen her life unfold in front of the world, and as a record of how she understands it now. She sees the potential of its manipulation, and how the consequences can careen out of control. Having been in the spotlight the vast majority of her life, both onscreen as an actor and offscreen as a Hollywood cautionary tale, Evan Rachel Wood understands how media works.

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