NEED TO KNOW
- Ron Howard has opened up about enduring friendship with his Happy Days costar Henry Winkler
- “We clicked immediately,” Howard said of connecting with his old pal while speaking exclusively to PEOPLE at the WSJ Future of Everything event on Wednesday, May 28
- The pair have stayed friends over the decades, with Winkler even serving as godfather to Howard’s daughter, actress Bryce Dallas Howard
Ron Howard and his Happy Days costar Henry Winkler were destined to become friends from the start.
The 71-year-old actor and director shared that the great chemistry between him and Winkler — who played Richie and Fonzie, respectively, on the classic sitcom — translated onscreen as well as off.
“We clicked. “We — Henry Winkler and I — clicked immediately, on a kind of professional level, but I also looked up to him,” Howard tells PEOPLE at the WSJ Future of Everything event on Wednesday, May 28 at The Glasshouse in New York City.
He said one of the things that initially intrigued him about The Waterboy star, 79, was how he was so unlike the rest of the people in Hollywood that Howard had met at the time.
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“Henry’s a few years older than I am. Yale educated, and he looked at acting in a way that was — it wasn’t Hollywood,” Howard shares. “It was a little more intellectual. It was theater based, and that was new to me. But more than anything, we just got along beautifully and worked well together.”
That mutual bond deepened over the years, leading to a decades-long friendship that stood the test of time and even produced classic films like 1982’s Night Shift — which Howard said Winkler helped to get “greenlit.”
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“When he agreed to do Night Shift, which was the first film Brian [Grazer] and I made together, it helped get the movie greenlit when Henry committed to be in the film, and so he did us both a huge solid when he committed to that movie,” he says.
Howard told PEOPLE earlier this month that because of Winkler’s support in Night Shift, his friend “played a hand in helping my dream ultimately come true, which was to be a studio, Hollywood, feature director.” He would go on to direct movies like A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and The Da Vinci Code.
Winkler was a willing participant, as he shared at the Steel City Con in Pittsburgh in April that Howard once asked him if he thought he “could do” directing and he responded saying, “‘Ron, knowing you, if you were a brain surgeon, even if I didn’t need to, I would be a patient.’ And he went on.”
The pair grew so close that the Rush director even made Winkler the godfather to his actress daughter Bryce Dallas Howard, 44. The Help star has also referred to Winkler in the past as someone who is “like a father to me.”
Winkler has equally praised his old friend over the years, previously saying of the Eden director, “You would never know that Ron was a star. He was another member of this wonderful unit.”
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