Bryce Dallas Howard is thinking of the trouble she faced growing up.

Bryce recalled being a curious child with a taste for serious themes and struggling to communicate.

“I was such a messed-up kid – I would walk around the Disney lot reading about euthanasia,” Bryce told U.K. newspaper The Independent. “But I also wasn’t dark. There was just a sort of intensity to my feelings and the stories I was curious about.”

“When I was growing up, I had a lot of difficulties learning and communicating,” she said. “I was always very happy and smiley, but not extremely verbal. It was unclear what intelligence was there, and how much I was really processing.”

The actress shared that her parents, Ron Howard and author Cheryl Howard, were worried about her lack of communication.

“‘Can we talk about the dead babies?’ the therapist would ask,” the actress recalled. “ ‘Because Bryce talks a lot about dead babies,’ ” she added, laughing.

Bryce Dallas Howard went on to clarify that it “wasn’t as bad as it sounded” and she simply loved “dystopian fiction,” listing The Handmaid’s Tale as one of her favorite novels.