Despite his brother being an Academy Award-winning director, his niece’s bona fides as an action movie star, and his prolific acting résumé, Clint Howard stresses his family isn’t “anything special.”
“I understand that, yeah, what Ron [Howard] and I have done is very unique,” Clint Howard told Fox News Digital in a recent interview. “We’re just people that make a living. We’re just people that have jobs and, you know, yeah, our jobs are creative, our jobs are creative. That doesn’t mean we’re anything special.”
He also praised Ron’s daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, 44, who starred in three films of the “Jurassic World” franchise.
“Bryce is a wonderful, wonderful person, great, great mother, great leader amongst her friends,” Clint gushed. “She’s directing now, and she likes to act, and she’s really humble about it all.”
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Clint, 66, and Ron, 71, both started in the business as children, with Ron playing Opie Taylor on “The Andy Griffith Show” starting in 1960 and Clint finding fame on “Gentle Ben” in 1967.
Since then, Clint has done everything from “The Jungle Book” to “Seinfeld” to “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” and several incarnations of “Star Trek,” and Ron is a celebrated director of movies like “Splash,” “Parenthood,” “Apollo 13,” and “Solo: A Star Wars Story.”
He also won two Oscars for “A Beautiful Mind” in 2002, and was nominated for best director and best picture in 2008 for “Frost/Nixon.”
The two brothers are also celebrating the fact that they are each up for their first acting Emmys this year: Ron for his guest spot on “The Studio,” and Clint for his 13-episode turn on “The Bold and the Beautiful.”
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“I know in heaven, somewhere, my mom is up there just beaming, beaming that her boys got nominated for Emmys,” Clint said. “And it’s pretty wacky. I mean, the fact is I think this is one of the first times that two brothers have been nominated in the same year for Emmys. You know, so I’m sure it’s happened … but it’s a wonderful achievement.”
He said while he’ll be attending the Daytime Emmy Awards for his nomination in “The Bold and the Beautiful,” he would be watching the Primetime Emmy Awards from home, “and I hope to God Ron wins.”
Ron has received more than two dozen Emmy nominations in the past for directing and producing, and won a Golden Globe for his acting on “Happy Days” in 1978.
Clint said that from a young age Ron realized he wanted to be a filmmaker, but he was also a “very deserving actor.”
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“Actually, my brother’s dream of being a filmmaker started when he was about 16 years old,” he explained, but he said even as a child Ron was an excellent actor.
“I’ll tell you, my brother did a movie called ‘The Courtship of Eddie’s Father’ with Glenn Ford, and Ron was about seven or eight years old at the time,” he said. “And he gave the best performance by a juvenile actor I’ve ever seen. And I’m very critically conscious about what I’m saying. Ron’s work on that movie was frigging awesome.”
Clint said it was “amazing” to him that Ron “had never been nominated for [an acting] Emmy Award considering he’d been in the frigging television business for frigging, I don’t know, it’s going on 70 years now with him.”
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Clint has also been in the business for nearly the same amount of time as his big brother, with more than 200 acting credits to his name.
But he didn’t receive his first Emmy nomination until he played homeless man turned rock star Tom Starr on “The Bold and the Beautiful” last fall.
He said that he had originally signed on to do two episodes after doing an improvised audition, “and the next thing you know, I’m on the show.”
The part ballooned from two episodes to 13 until his character was fatally poisoned in a whodunit.
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“I was Tom the homeless guy who, by the way, he was a minister in another lifetime of his. And he was able to perform [a] wedding [on the show]. And then, oh, now he’s Tom the homeless guy who has a job because of [character] Deacon’s [Sharpe] restaurant. And then I’m Tom the Homeless Guy with a job who also has a past. Tom the homeless guy was actually Tom Starr, the rock star. And so all of a sudden, I mean, I’m a rock star, and then all of sudden I’m Tom the homeless guy who had a job, who was a rockstar, who drank the blue Gatorade, or whatever it was.”
When his character collapsed and died, Clint revealed that it was his wife in real life who caught him as he fell.
“It was a wonderful moment,” he admitted. “My wife, Kat, I love her dearly, and she was around the set. They asked her if she’d like to be an extra that day that I die, and I fell into my wife’s arms. When I died, they didn’t have a stuntman, but I trusted my wife would catch me. So everything worked out well.”
He also noted that the pace of doing a soap opera is “second to none.”
There’s a “tremendous amount” of lines to learn in a short period of time,” he said.
“I think my experience working on ‘Bold and the Beautiful’ has only made me a better actor because, you know, you gotta go, you gotta go, You gotta shoot, you gotta shoot … You don’t have a lot of time to screw around,” Clint explained.
Clint has several films coming out soon, he was in the cult horror hit “Terrifier 3,” and he’s developing a reboot to his 1995 slasher film “Ice Cream Man,” revealing that Ron will make a cameo.
“As a little secret here, my brother has agreed to be in the movie,” he said, along with Ron’s daughter Paige Howard, and Clint’s own teenage daughter, Raffie.
Clint has also been directed by his brother multiple times and called him an “actor’s director.”
“I love being directed by Ron,” he told Fox News Digital. “Ron is an actor’s director. You know, there are some directors that don’t know how to handle actors. There’s some directors that don’t understand actors, but Ron does. Ron knows when to goose us, Ron knows to stroke us, and Ron knows when and to allow, I mean, the entertainment business is a collaborative effort. You know, being an actor in show business on movies or television, it’s a collaboration. You’re really only as good as … the people around you and especially the director, you know? And so, I always enjoy being directed by him.”
But no matter how “awesome of a director Ron is, Clint said:” He’s a better big brother than he is a filmmaker. He really truly is. I was so blessed in my life to have him be my older brother.”
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He added there’s never been any “competition” between the two of them. “He’s always been my older brother that I love.”
