Ron Howard has taken to social media to share his feelings about the Happy Days reunion at the 2024 Emmy Awards on Sunday.
The actor—who played Richie Cunningham on the American sitcom—shared the awards ceremony stage with Henry Winkler, who starred as Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, famously known as "The Fonz" or "Fonzie" on the show.
The pair walked out into a recreation of the Arnold's Drive-In to celebrate Happy Days' 50th anniversary and presented the award for Best Directing for a Comedy Series. Happy Days ran for 11 seasons from 1974 to 1984.
The New York Post shared an article about their Emmys meetup via X, formerly Twitter, and Howard responded to it in a comment underneath the post.
"so .... much... fun. and a little emotional," The Da Vinci Code director wrote.
Winkler also reached out on the platform in a message to a fan.
"@hwinkler4real great stuff on The Emmys! You are still the master!" X user @toddtvl said.
"Thank you !!!" the two-time Golden Globe Award winner replied.
During their Emmys segment, the duo engaged in banter back and forth before noticing a problem.
"This is fantastic," Howard said, as he looked around at the set.
"Feels like home," Winkler replied.
"Did you notice anything, though?" Howard asked, which prompted Winkler to say, "Well, there was no music."
"I have a solution," Howard responded. "You know, you could do it."
Winkler noted he was "out of practice" before walking over to the jukebox and playing the show's theme song by Pratt & McClain.
Newsweek reached out to Howard and Winkler's teams via email for additional comment.
In an interview with Bill Maher on the Club Random with Bill Maher podcast on September 8, Winkler recalled the difficulty he had getting hired after playing The Fonz.
"You did one of the most Houdini-esque escapes that you can do in showbusiness, which is get out of massive fame in a type castable role. That's a Houdini-esque move," Maher said on the episode, to which Winkler replied, "That was hard work."
"That was, oh, sometimes painful. I was not hirable," the Emmy Award winner said. "People said, 'Oh, he's so funny, he's so great, but he was The Fonz,' and I could not get hired."
While appearing on British comedy talk showThe Graham Norton Show in November 2021, Howard said he clashed with the network over the show when Winkler skyrocketed to fame as The Fonz.
"It was a really interesting kind of paradoxical situation because the show began, and the Richie Cunningham character was the undeniable lead of the show," he said.
"When we would go out of the road to promote the show, it was just insane, focused on Fonzie, clearly that was very exciting," he continued. "Except the executives, studio heads, network heads, you know, they started treating me with a lot of disrespect from a business standpoint [and] in terms of interaction."
"The press kept saying 'What's it like? Do you feel like you've become a secondhand citizen on your own show?'" he remembered.
Despite those issues, Howard and Winkler were great friends—and still are today. Howard added at the time that Winkler is "the godfather of all four of my kids."
Winkler, 78, went on to have a successful career—writing 40 children's books, in addition to starring in Arrested Development, Barry, The Waterboy, Click, Night Shift and more.
Howard, meanwhile, set his sights on directing after Happy Days, producing mega hits including Apollo 13, Hillbilly Elegy, A Beautiful Mind, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and others. This year, the 70-year-old won the Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special for Jim Henson Idea Man.
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