Ron Howard’s short-lived career as a method actor: “Everyone had just watched me ascend”
Method acting remains one of the profession’s most divisive practices, even though it’s not a coincidence that many stars regarded as the best to grace the silver screen adopted it. Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Christian Bale, and Ron Howard are just some of them, and it’s forgivable if you had to do a double-take just there.
One of those names is not like the others, and it’s not hard to figure out which one. For one thing, the two-time Academy Award winner hasn’t been a full-time performer in almost 40 years, and even when he was, it wasn’t as if he discussed his approach to the craft with steepled fingers, ruminating on how he processed his trauma to add new layers of depth and humanity to Happy Days‘ Richie Cunningham.
Howard has worked with many method actors on both sides of the camera, but nobody would look at any of his onscreen credits and think, ‘Now there’s a guy who stays in character for the duration’. He didn’t quite go that far, but there was a brief spell where he embraced the technique.
This being the wholesome, cherub-cheeked youngster who was all over screens throughout the 1960s and 1970s, though, there’s a distinctly Howard-esque slant to his method moment. It involved memories of a dead dog called Gulliver, the guy who played Sylvester Stallone’s closest ally in the Rambo franchise, and a potential tilt at an Academy Award nomination.
The fourth season premiere of The Andy Griffith Show was ‘Opie and the Birdman’ and revolved around Howard’s character accidentally killing a mother bird and being left to rear its three chicks. It’s arguably the show’s most famous and acclaimed episode, and a lot of that is down to his performance, which saw him use his emotionally devastating memories of dear Gulliver.
“For the first time as an actor, I cried real tears and trembled real trembles,” Howard recalled. “I’d come a long way from my subpar display of emotion in The New Housekeeper, when Sheldon Leonard intimated that he might have to spank a performance out of me.”
After his big moment was over, he felt like he’d arrived. “When [director] Dick Crenna yelled, ‘Cut!’, I was still in my method-y sad zone, but the mood around me was one of euphoria. Everyone had just watched me ascend to a new level. From every angle, big adult hands extended toward me to shake mine or tousle my hair, or pat me on the back in congratulation.”
Howard once again took the method approach when Vincent Minnelli cast him in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, using the memories of his dearly departed canine friend to “place myself in the character’s frame of mind, convulsing with grief, discovering emotional depths I was hitherto unaware of.”
He even recalled that MGM “was so impressed by my work that they considered mounting a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ campaign for me,” so maybe he wasn’t half bad at the whole method thing. If anything, Howard realised that it made him up his game: “I had gone deep. I was no longer a child actor. I was an actor, period.” Ron Howard: Method Actor was only a phase, but it’s hard to say it didn’t work.
