How Ron Howard’s obliviousness landed him his white whale: “I harboured little hope we’d actually get him”
With 70 years of film and television experience under his belt, Ron Howard has worked with a laundry list of legends, icons, and A-listers of multiple generations, but there’s always the one that got away.
In his case, it was Jack Nicholson, with the actor and filmmaker constantly hoping that he’d one day get the chance to collaborate with one of the all-time greats, but it wasn’t to be. He almost did, but the three-time Academy Award-winning hell-raiser didn’t think Frost/Nixon was the right move at the time.
That doesn’t diminish the array of talents he has worked with, though, since Howard is the only person in the business who’s co-starred with John Wayne and directed Kevin James, not to mention the solitary soul who’s gotten a slap on the arse from Bette Davis and voiced a sentient colon cell, as he did in Osmosis Jones.
There aren’t many boxes on his to-do list that remain unchecked, although he’d love to reunite with Michael Keaton for the first time in decades, but there was a white whale he never thought he’d land until his producing partner, Brian Grazer, discovered that he wasn’t following the tabloid gossip columns.
1992’s Far and Away was Howard’s first passion project, and a concept he’d been ideating since childhood. When it finally entered pre-production, there was one leading man at the top of his potential wish list, but never in a million years did he think his quaint period romance would have enough sway.
“Almost from the beginning, Tom Cruise was the person I visualised in the role of Joseph,” he explained. “We first talked about the project in 1983, after he’d already made a big hit with Risky Business. I thought he’d be perfect, but I harboured little hope that we’d actually get him. In 1986, when Top Gun came out and broke $100 million, little hope became no hope.”
At the same time as Howard was crying into his cornflakes about not being able to secure Cruise for Far and Away, Grazer was lobbying hard to cast Nicole Kidman as his onscreen love interest, Shannon. Even though they were Hollywood’s latest golden couple, the Happy Days star’s head was stuck firmly up his rear end in that regard.
“Tom had mentioned that he enjoyed working with Nicole Kidman on Days of Thunder,” Howard recalled. “I told him that was an interesting coincidence, since we already wanted her to play Shannon. When I told this to Brian, he said, ‘Ron, will you read a newspaper once in a while?'”
Somehow, he had no idea that Cruise and Kidman were an item, and as fate would have it, they were married in December 1990, less than six months before Far and Away started shooting. He didn’t think he had a chance of casting the former, and he was going after the latter anyway, so it all worked out in the end, and Howard snagged the white whale he’d always wanted.
