14 DAY TRIAL // Rachel Evan Wood is featured in the latest issue of Net-A-Porter.com’s The Edit, with a candid interview in which she talks about her career and the men in her life. One sizeable chunk of it is dedicated to the controversial relationship she had with shock rocker Marilyn Manson, starting 2006.
At the time, Wood was only 19, while he was 36. They dated on and off for about 4 years, and eventually called it quits one year after becoming engaged: unlike anything he’d done before, Manson proposed to her on stage in Paris.
They weren’t made to be together, the actress muses in this new interview.
“I thought I was in love”
Despite the age difference and the fact that she was very young when she started dating the rocker, Wood says she didn’t do it because she was feeling rebellious or because she wanted to give people something to talk about.
She really thought she was “in love” and that they would get to grow old together. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have put herself in the limelight like she did, because she was suddenly deemed responsible for the fact that his marriage to burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese ended.
Manson and Wood started dating shortly after he broke up with Dita, and though there was no indication that Wood had anything to do with the split, the tabloids assumed that she did. He must have cheated on Dita with Wood, who at the time styled herself as a younger Dita.
No regrets
After Wood and Manson broke up, there was even more speculation on what had gone wrong. Unnamed “insiders” claimed that the split had been nasty and offered a wide range of possible causes for what happened, some more outrageous than others.
None of that was true, she seems to be saying. As far as she’s concerned, she has no regrets about dating Manson, even if they didn’t end up growing old together.
“I knew I was edgier, more alternative, and weird. And [Marilyn] was just what I needed, because I felt really free with him. And that freedom was attractive,” she says. “I wouldn’t trade any of [our relationship]. I appreciate everything he taught me. I just don’t think we were right for each other.”