Before Ron Howard became a superstar director, he was a child actor, with one of his most notable roles being Opie Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show. He has since made some major revelations about his time in the fictional town of Mayberry alongside the late Andy Griffith.
The Andy Griffith Show was filmed on the set of Desilu Studios. Ron once called the crew “salty old characters who swore like sailors and drank like fishes.” The crew often smoke cigarettes on set. “My eyes were always burning,” he revealed.
Griffith and Don Knotts had been friends before costaring together on The Andy Griffith Show. Knotts ended up leaving the show in 1965, a move that Ron believed devastated Griffith.
“I think, for Andy, the show was never the same after Don left,” Ron said, per Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show.
“He didn’t have that partner. The absolute foundation of the show, and why it endures, is Andy-Barney,” he added. “And yes, the feeling of what Mayberry was. But without the comedy that they generated, I don’t think the show ever would have endured.”
Ron became one of the biggest child actors of his time. However, when his eldest daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, was growing up, he didn’t want her to jump into acting right away.
“My parents were very firm on that boundary, that they were not going to support anyone who wanted to be a child actor,” she told People in February 2024.
Ron wanted to shield Bryce from the pressures of stepping into Hollywood as a child.
“On top of everything else, because the characters that I played as a child were so well-known as to almost be iconic … I also thought, ‘Hey, if one of our kids tries to act as a child, boy or girl, they’re going to be unfairly compared,’” he said.
Bryce now has a successful acting and directorial career of her own, but Ron still holds firm on discouraging kids from acting.
“I always try to discourage parents from putting their children in this business, especially little kids,” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “I’m one of the few child actors who got through it without a lot of anger and resentment. Most child actors aren’t taught how to act. They’re sort of taught how to perform. They’re like trained animals. I think I made it through because I was working toward something. I had a different dream.”
Although his opinions are rather strong on child acting, he does not have regrets about his experience on The Andy Griffith Show.
“Other kids may resent [acting], but mostly I really enjoyed it,” he said. “I felt very comfortable. I understood it. It was an environment where I knew I was excelling.”
Before he was a teen, Ron realized that he wanted to try his hand at directing.
“When I was 10, one of the directors on The Andy Griffith Show said, ‘I see the way you’re looking at the camera and following rehearsals even when you’re not in the scenes, and I have a feeling you’re gonna be a director,’” Ron told Harvard Business Review. “Then, when I was around 12, I began to fall in love with the movies. The Graduate, Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde — those films were a bit neorealist, borrowing from Europe, and had an anarchy and rebellion that was beginning to emerge in American cinema. It was a kind of cinematic revolution. I related to it, and I loved it, and I began to understand that there was this other thing beyond half-hour sitcoms. And the person behind that filmmaking was first and foremost the director. I wanted to play in that sandbox.”
