Bryce Dallas Howard is the daughter of a very famous man in Hollywood — director Ron Howard, but she is becoming an industry heavy-weight in her own right.

Howard, who was married last August and gave birth to her son Theo in February, stars in the box-office smash “Spider-Man 3” as Gwen Stacy — Mary Jane’s rival for Spider-Man’s affection.

The film required Howard, who grew up in Greenwich, Conn., to do some risky stunts – like falling out of a building. A crane blows through her office building and she ends up suspended over Fifth Avenue. All this happened during the very beginning of her pregnancy — before even knew she was carrying a child. She found out soon there after.

“Well, I was really scared,” she told Early Show co-anchor Hannah Storm. “At first I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I should have known.’ I felt so irresponsible. But it was O.K. He was very — he was like practically just conceived, so thank God, it was okay.”

Theo is doing well, Howard said. He sleeps through the night and eats well. He has also taught his mother how to be flexible.

“You have certain expectations and things that you want to be just a certain way,” she said. “And then you realize that it can’t be the way that you expect it…I would be hard on myself or really disappointed, and then you just — if you just kind of let go of all that and really be present with your child and just do the best you can at every given moment, then, you know, then things usually turn out, hopefully.”

Her director father loves being a grandfather. Howard said the director, a father of four, is very nurturing and having an infant around has brought out a “youthful side of him.”

“I mean, he’s behaving almost like a kid again,” she said.

Howard, who studied drama at New York University, said that playing Gwen Stacy was fun because she completely changed her look from a red-head to bleach blonde to play the flirty and devious Gwen Stacy.

“I never really dyed my hair anything significant from my natural hair color,” she said. “I was bleaching it every 10 days because my roots were like, ‘I’m a redhead, please, I’m a redhead!’ It was unreal. My husband was just like, hmm, ‘I kind of like this.'”