If beloved deputy Barney Fife and precocious grade-schooler Opie Taylor seemed like family on “The Andy Griffith Show,” it may be because the actors actually were.
Ron Howard, who started his career in show business playing the son of Andy Griffith’s sheriff character on the 1960s sitcom, said he recently found out he and Knotts are distant cousins.
Now better known for his work behind the camera on films like “A Beautiful Mind” and “Apollo 13,” Howard, 71, shared a late 1990s photo on his Instagram of a reunion with his “Andy Griffith” costars.
He shared that Griffith and Knotts had “surprised me with a visit to the set of #Ransom in #Queens.” Howard directed the 1996 Mel Gibson thriller.
He added, “It was recently confirmed that Don and I were actually distant cousins!”
Howard was cast as Opie on the show, which ran from 1960 until 1968, when he was just 5 years old.
“I will forever owe a debt to Opie Taylor,” he wrote in his 2021 book “The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family,” according to Closer Weekly. “The experience of inhabiting that character, walking a mile in his Keds, defined my early life.”
He also revealed on the podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” last year that Griffth would kill jokes in the scripts for the show if he thought they were too “broad.”
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“He just kept saying, ‘The South is plenty funny on its own without having to do slapstick and stuff … He didn’t’ like ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ because they were doing sketch basically. As a result, I don’t know if there have been other single camera shows that kind of held that tone. Maybe ‘The Real McCoys’ a little bit, but they didn’t have Don Knotts.”
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He also revealed that Knotts and Griffith would often improvise the scenes where the sheriff’s department coworkers would shoot the breeze if the show was a bit short that week.
“The show really does endure, and it’s actually on all the time,” Howard told O’Brien.
“How lucky was I to grow up in that situation where, in fact, the environment was set up for actors to, not improvise, but participate, make suggestions, things like that,” he said. “And even as a 6-year-old, I mean my dad was having to read the lines at the read through, and I was just kind of sitting there at first, but later when I started to learn to read and so forth, I was in it.”
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Howard remembered another time when he was 7 years old and shooting a scene for the second season. He said he told the director he did not think a kid would say one of his lines the way it was written, and the director told him to say whatever way he felt made sense.
“I just felt this surge of being involved in something,” he said of the childhood moment.
Howard told O’Brien as he was visibly pleased with himself, Griffth asked him, “What are you grinning at, youngin’?” And after Howard told him it was the first suggestion of his that the show had taken, Griffth waited a beat, then jokingly answered, “Well, it was the first one that was any damn good. Now, let’s rehearse the scene!”
Howard also revealed that on the first episode of the show, his father told Griffith that Opie was being written as a “wisea–,” suggesting, “What if he actually respected his father?”
Griffith later told Howard, as an adult, that after that, he went back to the writers and told them to write Opie like a real child.
Howard also told Closer Weekly in 2018 that Griffith and Knotts made it easy to be creative in front of the camera because they shared a mutual respect for each other’s talent.
“Andy was the world’s greatest audience for Don,” he recalled. “Don had Andy literally in tears once a week. [I learned] about the spirit of collaboration, which I’ve carried with me forever.”
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Last year, Knotts’ daughter Karen Knotts told Fox News Digital that one of the biggest misconceptions about her father and Griffith was that they were rivals.
“They weren’t rivals at all,” she explained. “There was no rivalry. Andy was my dad’s biggest fan. He was a mentor to him his whole life, and they loved each other dearly.”
“Some people had problems with Andy Griffith because he liked to do things his way,” she shared. “But he and my dad had an unbelievably close relationship. They understood each other and their need for perfection when it came to performing. Andy would always tell people, ‘Don is the funny one.’”
Karen previously told Fox News Digital that meeting Howard was “my favorite memory from the set.”
“He was just so different from any other kid I knew,” she shared. “We’re the same age and I thought he was just so mature. He always had this little tiny transistor radio. He would show it to me, and he was so involved in the technical aspects of it. I guess it was kind of a foreshadowing of his interest to direct. But he was very friendly, and it meant a lot to me.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Knotts’ daughter for comment about Howard’s news.
