The actor Ron Howard will always regret never making a movie with: “I tried very, very hard”
As an actor and filmmaker, Ron Howard has worked with a mind-boggling array of stars, legends, and icons spanning multiple generations, which is par for the course for anyone who’s been around as long as he has.
Few people can say they’ve shared the screen with John Wayne and directed Sydney Sweeney, but Howard can. Few people can say they’ve directed Bette Davis and shared the screen with Harrison Ford, but Howard can. Few people can say they’ve made features for Roger Corman, Netflix, and Prime Video, but Howard can. On and on it goes, underlining his longevity and versatility.
Sure, his work lacks the style and visual daring many would associate with one of Hollywood’s most accomplished filmmakers, but Howard’s filmography is much more eclectic than most of his peers. That willingness to tackle as many genres as possible has kept him in demand, employed, and busy for the last five decades, which hasn’t left him harbouring regrets.
He’s won two Academy Awards, earned billions of dollars at the box office, and collaborated with everyone from Tom Hanks and Henry Fonda to Kevin James and Randy Quaid, but there’s one actor Howard fleetingly crossed paths with early in his career that he wished he’d gotten the chance to make a movie with.
During Jack Nicholson’s time as one of the industry’s biggest stars and headline-grabbing hellraisers, everyone wanted to work with him. That didn’t change when he entered his elder statesman years either, only for the crushingly dull rom-com How Do You Know to draw a line under an incredible career.
Howard and Nicholson briefly acted opposite each other in a 1967 episode of The Andy Griffith Show, with the director admitting to Graham Bensinger that the three-time Oscar winner was somebody he spent his career desperate to share a set with, and he shared the closest he managed to get.
“I tried very, very hard to get Jack Nicholson to play Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon,” he shared. “Frank Langella had been brilliant on stage, but the studio was interested in going after bigger stars if we could. I met with Nicholson many times and said, ‘I think you’d be brilliant in this’. And he said, ‘I just don’t think I’m that guy, I don’t think I can do that.'”
Ironically, the movie in which Howard pulled out all the stops to woo Nicholson was for a role that was among the easiest to cast. Langella originated the part in the Frost/Nixon stage play, won a Tony for his efforts, reprised it in the film, and earned an Oscar nomination.
On the plus side, Howard did at least manage to work with Nicholson once. Unfortunately, the former was only a kid at the time, and the latter wasn’t a household name, so they never reunited at the peak of their respective powers.
