After making his feature-length directorial debut on the Roger Corman-produced Grand Theft Auto in 1977, Ron Howard gradually phased himself out of acting to focus on his real dream of making it as a filmmaker.
It was a bold call for someone who’d been beamed into millions of homes on a weekly basis since they were a kid to give it all up and head down another career path, especially when The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, and American Graffiti star was still only in his early 20s.
Needless to say, it worked out very well for Howard in the long run, who sits pretty as a two-time Academy Award winner, one of the highest-grossing directors in cinema history, and has earned a reputation for being one of Hollywood’s safest, most reliable, and trustworthy hands.
The last time Howard was credited as a fictional figure in a film came when he reprised his role of Steve Bolander in 1979’s More American Graffiti. On the small screen, he hasn’t played anyone other than himself since a three-episode guest arc as Stanley in The Odd Couple, which aired in 2016, and that was his first time he’d played a character on TV in 20 years.
With that in mind, it’s reasonable to assume that Howard’s thespian days are over, unless his daughter can convince him otherwise. However, there’s one part he’d gladly play again after he voiced his desire to revisit a mildly antagonistic figure he knows better than anyone else: Ron Howard.
In Seth Rogen’s AppleTV+ series The Studio, the affable director hammed it up as an exaggerated and semi-fictionalised version of himself, ending up in a hilarious faux brawl with Rogen’s beleaguered studio boss, Matt Remick, throwing his trademark baseball cap with such force that it knocks Remick to the ground.
It was a hilarious and scene-stealing turn that allowed Howard to unleash his latent comedy chops for the first time in a long time, and he’d gladly do it again. “If I could make room in my schedule and I were asked, I’d be there in a heartbeat for these guys,” he told People. “They were hilarious and fun to be with.”
That said, Howard felt compelled to maintain his nice guy reputation by reiterating that he isn’t an obnoxious dickhead like the guy he played in The Studio. “Even if the jerk is inspired by you, it’s still a character, and it’s very cathartic,” he explained. “Because I would never say or do those things.”
Still, if Howard returns for a second tilt at playing ‘Ron Howard: Jerk’ in The Studio, it’ll technically be the first time he’s played a character twice in almost 40 years, seeing as it’s a heightened version of himself.
