Ron Howard Finally Reckons With His Role in Elevating JD Vance

Ron Howard has finally started responding to questions about his role in elevating the profile of Donald Trump’s now running mate, JD Vance, after adapting Vance’s memoir into 2020’s Amy Adams and Glenn Close starrer Hillbilly Elegy.

Howard, speaking from the Toronto International Film Festival where he’s promoting his latest movie Eden, told Deadline he’s been both “surprised and disappointed” by what he’s heard from Vance since his ascension to the spotlight after Trump selected him for VP. According to Howard, at the time he was adapting Vance’s book into the Netflix film, the Ohio-born lawyer wasn’t interested in politics.

“We didn’t talk a lot of politics when we were making the movie,” Howard told the site, “I was interested in his upbringing and that survival tale. That’s what we mostly focused on.” But, as Howard said, “that was then.”

“Based on the conversations that we had during that time, I just have to say I’m very surprised and disappointed by much of the rhetoric that I’m reading and hearing,” he continued. “People do change, and I assume that’s the case.”

After Hillbilly Elegy was released in 2020 and nominated for two Academy Awards (Howard was also nominated for Worst Director at the Razzies) Vance ran for and won a senate seat in Ohio in 2022 with Trump’s endorsement. Over the next couple of years, he became a regular on cable news, defending any and everything Trump said, despite naming Trump “America’s Hitler” in a leaked private conversation from 2016, before Trump selected him to be his VP running mate.

Vance has made several incendiary comments both before and after that, however, including his “childless cat ladies” comment, which Close alluded to on Instagram, writing that her cat “would have left a bleeding mouse head in the bed of anyone who criticized any kind of lady with a CAT!” She then told Variety late last month that she “wouldn’t sit down with [Vance]” if she had the opportunity because, “What good would it do?”

She continued, “You only hope that people in our government have a moral backbone and that they don’t say one thing and then say something that’s 150 degrees different.” Adams, on the other hand, has yet to come out one way or another on Vance’s comments.

But Howard is making it clear that even though he was inspired by Vance’s life story, he is very much against the Republican ticket. “There’s no version of me voting for Donald Trump to be President again, whoever the Vice President was,” he told Variety.

He went on to insist that “given the experience that I had then 5, 6 years ago, I’d say that I’ve been surprised,” but “it’s not really about a movie made five or six years ago.” Howard then added, “It is, but we need to respond to what we’re seeing, hearing, feeling now, and vote responsibly, whatever that is.”