When I first saw Evan Rachel Wood in the old ABC drama Once and Again, I remember thinking, "That girl has a big future." And indeed she has. She's in The Life Before Her Eyes, opening around the country this month, playing the younger version of Uma Thurman, a woman with a seemingly idyllic life until she starts flashing back to a high school shooting she witnessed years earlier. “I loved that character because she’s got big dreams,” Wood says.  “She does what she wants to do.  She wants to beat her own drum.  She lives in a strict, religious town, so she’s labeled a slut.  But she’s not.  She’s just different.  It was a hard movie to make because everything has a deeper meaning.” Watch her in the clip below.

Wood, whose parents are actors, made her stage debut as a baby in a North Carolina theater production of A Christmas Carol.  After her parents split up when she was nine, she moved to Los Angeles with her mother and older brother Ira.  She was soon playing Jessie, a troubled girl who suffered from anorexia, in the aforementioned Once and Again. Since then, Wood, now 20, has played teenagers in such films as Thirteen, Down in the Valley, Running with Scissors and last year’s Across the Universe. But she may now be moving into adult roles. Woody Allen cast her in his new untitled film, now shooting in New York.  Woody likes to keep his film plots secret, though, so we won’t know what she plays until the movie comes out next year.