Ron Howard spoke candidly when asked for his thoughts on the “legacy” of his film adaptation of JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, telling Vulture, “I don’t think about it.”
The film’s reception is “probably quite culturally divided,” Howard acknowledged in the new interview, but he seemed to take solace in the fact that even though “reviews were bad,” the “audience-reaction rating was pretty good.”
Vance’s public persona as MAGA vice president “remains a bit of a surprise to me” and “I would not have seen it coming,” Howard also said.
“I wouldn’t have expected his rhetoric to be as divisive as it sometimes is. By the way, I’m not following him or listening to every word,” he said.
Howard adapted Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy book for Netflix in 2020, tapping Amy Adams and Glenn Close to portray Vance’s mother and “Mamaw” as they navigate his mother’s addiction and the trappings of his impoverished upbringing in rural Ohio.
Vance was not yet a prominent figure on the right at the time the Oscar-bait film was released, and had even publicly called Donald Trump “reprehensible” and “an idiot.” He privately compared Trump to Adolf Hitler in leaked messages that would later return to bite him when he became a MAGA figurehead.
Vance has since declared he was “wrong” about Trump before becoming his VP, but Howard said the pre-film release comments sounded like the Vance he knew at the time.
“When I was working with him, all his quotes about the administration were very public. He was trying to run an investment fund. So the run for Senate and the strategy he’s chosen to follow are not what I would’ve expected,” he said Wednesday.
While some have said that the film’s poor critical reception turned Vance toward MAGA (In 2022, a friend of Vance’s told The Washington Post that the poor reception turned him off the left), Howard said “I can’t speak to that.” But he does know that Vance “resented” the poor reviews.
“He was frustrated,” Howard said. “He loved Glenn Close’s performance and Amy Adams’ performance and liked the film. And he felt that, just as reviews had kind of turned on the book, his involvement was in some way tainting or coloring the critical response, and he resented it.”
Adams has remained mum on Vance since his rise in politics—Close, on the other hand, has slammed Vance’s comments on “childless cat ladies” and attributed his change in persona to the “aphrodisiac of power.” She told The View last year, “I don’t know what happened.”
Howard made it known before the 2024 election that he had no intent of voting for Trump, “whoever the vice president was.” He also told Deadline of Vance in September, “People do change, and I assume that’s the case.”
That said, he revealed the last interaction he had with Vance. It was “one text,” he said, “which was just sort of ‘Godspeed. Try to serve us well.’”
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