Why did Ron Howard turn down working with Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers?
When you’ve been in the industry as long as Ron Howard has, and I mean seriously, his first onscreen performance came when he was just two, you don’t get starstruck easily.
Since he began acting, he has traversed television and movie roles before becoming a director himself, and with the success of his filmmaking career, he has turned down opportunities that many actors would kill for.
Howard found his breakthrough role came when he was just a kid in The Andy Griffith Show, prior to his tenure on Happy Days as an adult, which cemented his status as more than just a child star. He clearly had what it took to become a successful actor beyond appearing in sitcoms as a youngster, but he couldn’t shake the dream of being a director out of his head, either.
Thus, he decided to combine his passions, starring in his directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto, in 1977, and while it wasn’t a success, we all have to start somewhere, and within a few years, he had the art of directing nailed, finding particular popularity with the likes of Splash and Willow. He knew how to make an accessible Hollywood flick, and his star power quickly grew and, by the end of the 1990s, he had one of the most acclaimed movies of the decade, Apollo 13, under his belt.
Howard has no limits when it comes to what he directs, whether that be festive classics like How the Grinch Stole Christmas or the prequel movie Solo: A Star Wars Story, keeping himself more than busy with countless big projects over the years, such that acting has had to take quite the backseat. Apart from a few minor parts across movie and TV, you can hardly call Howard an actor anymore, even if that’s where he got his start as a youngin.
Thus, despite the fact that he has been tempted to come back to acting with offers to work with some of Hollywood’s most popular directors, nothing has convinced him to get back in the acting game just yet. For now, sticking behind the camera seems to interest him much more than being in front of it.
“Because I do move from film to film, I’ve never had the time to commit, but one of these days, I am going to make the time,” he admitted during a talk at Tribeca Film Festival.
If anyone can bring him back to acting, surely it’s someone as legendary as Scorsese or the Coen brothers, whose work has defined modern Hollywood for the past few decades, but he’s too busy saying no to them, as it seems like Howard doesn’t plan on stopping his streak of continuously releasing new movies any time soon, even though he hasn’t been receiving half as much praise as he used to.
In 2020, he made the critically panned Hillbilly Elegy about JD Vance (why give him the time of day?), while his most recent movie, Eden, has already faded into obscurity. Perhaps Howard should actually go and work with Scorsese or the Coens, and maybe that’ll revive his filmmaking skills.
