Few filmmakers in Hollywood history have been as inoffensive as Ron Howard, which is intended—at least partially—as a compliment.
Directors tend to be highly-strung folks who can fly off the handle when placed under pressure, but not Howard. He’s been the embodiment of calm and unruffled aw-shucks Americana since the beginning of his career when he was a household name before he’d even entered his teenage years.
Even though he never wanted to be an actor, something he realised early on, Howard spent eight years and almost 250 episodes playing Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, the first of the two ratings juggernauts he starred in before another lengthy stint on Happy Days a decade later.
It was during the latter series that he grew tired of the daily grind of performing for the cameras and decided that directing was his true calling, which turned out to be the right call when he became one of the highest-grossing filmmakers of all time, winning a pair of Academy Awards and earning a reputation for being the industry’s safest and most unremarkable pair of hands.
Still, he had to suffer for his art, never more so than when he was forced to confront one of his greatest fears on The Andy Griffith Show. As can no doubt be inferred from the title, the second season’s 11th episode, ‘The Pickle Story’, revolved around Frances Bavier’s Aunt Bee going out of her way to make a shitload of pickles.
Many of those pickles were subsequently devoured by Howard’s Opie, who forced himself to become a method actor at a very young age because he couldn’t stand eating them. Unfortunately, the nature of show business meant that he had to do it anyway, and he despised every last second of the experience.
“I hated pickles so much,” he lamented, dredging up a memory he’d hoped to keep buried in the darkest recesses of his mind. “Biting those pickles was just an unbelievable burden. It was a chore, painful. What I remember of the pickle episode is just all the wincing and frowning. The acting came in trying to act like I enjoyed the pickles.”
It’s completely on-brand for someone like Howard, an actor and filmmaker who’s been working solidly for almost 70 years despite never being regarded as one of the most naturally talented or effortlessly gifted at either, to call something as innocuous and vanilla as eating a large amount of pickles as the most regretful experience of a seven-decade career.
Still, it can’t have been easy for a kid who hated the very idea of brined cucumbers to devour them down in the name of maintaining his artistic integrity, and it wasn’t an experience he was hungry to replicate.
