The most arrogant moment of Ron Howard’s career: “There’s a fine line, and I crossed it”
Nobody would ever dream of calling Ron Howard arrogant when he’s one of Hollywood’s nicest and most wholesome fellas, and that’s because he learned his lesson about not being a dickhead in a professional capacity, which was a mistake he’d never make again.
Realistically, there was always a chance he’d get too big for his boots eventually. He was only six years old when he was cast as Opie Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show, which swiftly made him one of the most recognisable and popular young actors in America, and that came after he’d already appeared in a dozen other TV shows.
Tales of fresh-faced and cherubic performers succumbing to the pitfalls of fame are woven into the fabric of Hollywood, with countless kids who got their start at a very young age failing to maintain their careers once they age into older parts. Seeing as he’s now 70 years deep into his career, it’s safe to say the two-time Academy Award winner has done alright for himself.
Even when he became a director, nobody has any tales of Howard losing his shit, berating his cast and crew, or buckling under pressure. He’s been Mr Dependable since he first stepped behind the camera to helm Roger Corman’s Grand Theft Auto in 1977, and it can all be traced back to one incident.
As he wrote in his memoir, The Boys: “There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and I crossed it in The Andy Griffith Show‘s third season.” While shooting an episode titled ‘Andy Discovers America’, Howard decided to teach his fellow child actors a lesson when filming a scene set in a classroom.
“I felt like showing off,” he admitted. “This was my hit show, my set. I took on the role of ringleader, strutting around like I owned the place, goofing off and telling jokes right up until the camera assistant clapped the slate. In other words, I let things go to my head and forgot about the process, the discipline, and the etiquette of the set.”
Noticing that there was shithousery afoot, director Bob Sweeney took Howard aside and read him the riot act. To bring him back down to earth, the filmmaker informed his young charge that even though he was a good actor for his age, he wasn’t the best child actor in the scene that they were shooting, which hit the erstwhile Opie like a ton of bricks.
“I had been slipping into some sloppy acting habits,” he confessed. “Falling into the classic series regular trap of phoning it in.” To this day, Howard feels “a twinge of queasiness” thinking about the one and only time he became an arrogant arsehole as either an actor or director, a trait he immediately erased from his personality and banished to the rear-view mirror forevermore.
It’s completely on-brand for someone of Howard’s aw-shucks standing to be told to rein in his ego once in the 1960s and hold onto that mantra for the rest of his life, but it’s hard to say it didn’t have the desired effect.
