The role Ron Howard forced his mother to audition for: “I was in a bit of a dilemma”
Nepotism has been running rampant in Hollywood since the dawn of the moving image, and as an actor and filmmaker hailing from a showbiz family, nothing seemed out of the ordinary when Ron Howard would cast his nearest and dearest in his movies.
After all, his brother Clint has appeared in several of his features, his daughter Bryce made her feature-length debut in Parenthood, his father Rance was in six of his first nine films as a director, and his mother Jean has been in four of them, so Howard has no problems keeping it in the family.
However, just because they were related, it didn’t necessarily mean he was handing out free passes. In fact, even when his old man reached out personally and suggested Jean for a small but pivotal supporting role, the Happy Days veteran didn’t exactly hire her on the spot.
In Apollo 13, there’s a scene where Tom Hanks’ Jim Lovell has an emotional exchange with his mother, Blanche. It wasn’t the most prominent role in the picture, but Howard knew he needed a performer with the requisite dramatic chops to pull it off.
When he received a phone call from Rance during pre-production, the second-generation star was placed in a tricky position when his dad told him, “I think Jean would knock that out of the park.” Whether or not it was true, Howard had nonetheless been put under familial pressure to do his old dear a solid.
“Now I was in a bit of a dilemma,” he recalled in his memoir, The Boys. “Dad was leaning on me to cast Mom, but this part wasn’t a casual walk-on. Blanche has a major scene in which her daughter-in-law breaks the news to her that there has been an explosion in the command module, putting her son in danger.”
The role needed an actor who “displays a steely resolve,” leaving Howard torn between heart and head. While he “acceded to Dad’s request to give his thought some serious consideration,” he did so with his directorial hat remaining firmly in place, knowing that he “couldn’t play favourites or assume Mom was a natural for the part.”
In the end, there was only one course of action: “I made her audition.” As much as he’d been happy to hire his parents, siblings, and children in the past, Apollo 13 wasn’t the type of film where Howard would simply bring in his mother because her husband had decided to see if he could cash in a filmic favour.
Understandably, he “drove to their house nervous as a cat” to put Jean through her paces, and he wasn’t particularly confident she had the necessary chops. Howard recalled being “fully prepared to have an awkward, let-them-down-gently conversation” after the audition before bringing in somebody else, only to be sufficiently won over that he gave her the gig.
Was it ever in any doubt? It’s hard to tell, knowing how awkward things could have been at any subsequent family gatherings. Still, at least Howard proved he wasn’t dishing out plum roles out of charity.
