- Ron Howard once saw his daughter Bryce fully nude in one of her college plays.
- "It was a complete assault on a father's psyche," he said.
Seeing your kid naked onstage is probably not exactly what a parent hopes for their children.
But that's what Ron Howard got when he went to see his daughter Bryce years ago in a college play, according to Howard, who appears in this weekend's episode of "In Depth with Graham Bensinger," as reported by People.
"Within seven or eight minutes into the show, nobody had any clothes on," Howard said of the experimental theater production. "I was sitting next to my dad — I wasn't sure what he would think. When it was over, he turned to me and said, 'I think that's just great. That's what college is all about. She's never going to be afraid onstage again.' That's just the way he viewed things. So, he was proud of her, of her courage as an artist."
When Bensinger asked Howard if he was reluctant to see his daughter in the play, he mused, "No, because first of all, I knew there was nudity. I didn't realize it was full-body, nonstop. It was a complete assault on a father's psyche."
Howard first realized Bryce could act at the age of 13.
"I saw that she could do it," he said, adding he was "proud of her but a little terrified because the business is so much tougher for women than it is for men, and I dreaded the fact that she was gonna have the talent to really be able to make a run at it."
Bryce, who graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, eventually went on to star in "The Village," "The Help," and two "Jurassic World" films. She has also directed several episodes of "The Mandalorian," as well as an episode of "The Book of Boba Fett."
While Bryce has previously said she was insecure about the famous family name during her college years, she "realized pretty quickly" there was nothing to be embarrassed about.
"For me to be weird about something that, honestly, really doesn't have anything to do with me — I just realized, that's just shortsighted," she told the Los Angeles Times in 2020. "So many of my peers at NYU had parents who were really not supportive of them being artists in any way, shape, or form, which totally made sense because they were scared for them. I had parents who were emotionally supportive of me. ... There wasn't a lot of baggage that I inherited from them in that way."