Credit: Far Out / Georges Biard
Tue 26 May 2026 21:15, UK
If a scripted fight scene threatens to boil over and explode into real violence on set, it’s hard to imagine anyone more ill-suited to the task of breaking it up than Ron Howard.
No disrespect intended, but he’s not really the sort of guy you’d want in your corner. Has he ever thrown a punch in anger? Probably not, since he’s spent most of his career being touted as one of the nicest guys in the industry, but he will at least try to smooth things over when fisticuffs are on the cards.
It wasn’t quite Rip Torn and Dennis Hopper threatening to stab each other, but when the shots started getting laid in a little too realistically for one actor’s liking, they felt that they had no other option but to pull Howard aside and ask him to maybe have a quiet word in their co-star’s ear about it.
Naturally, the production that saw the two-time Academy Award winner playing peacemaker between two warring thespians was a dramedy about a newspaper. On the surface, The Paper shouldn’t require Howard to step in, but Glenn Close was getting too much into character for Michael Keaton.
In the film, the pair play Henry Hackett and Alicia Clark, two workplace arch-enemies. When the former starts pursuing the story of a lifetime, the latter continues throwing obstacles in his way, culminating in what should have been a theatrical fistfight between them, which culminates in Close emerging victorious and firing Keaton for his behaviour.
It’s largely played for laughs, but there was nothing funny about it from Keaton’s perspective. It took a few takes for them to get it right, and the longer the scene went on, the more likely he was to take a genuine battering from Close, who wouldn’t know how to phone in a performance if she tried.
“He said, ‘Ron, if you can, hold down the number of takes, because Glenn is going full throttle,’” Howard recalled. “‘And let me tell you, she’s seriously strong!’” Keaton played Batman, for fuck sake, and yet, there he was, urging The Paper‘s director to try to wrap the sequence as quickly as possible because Close was knocking lumps out of him every time.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Even though she was reliably solid in the role, Close still regrets her performance in the picture, admitting that she took things too seriously in retrospect. Keaton would agree, seeing as that straight-faced commitment to character resulted in him pleading with Howard to get the footage he needed before he transformed into a human-sized walking bruise.
The filmmaker has always had a soft spot for The Paper, which he considers one of his most overlooked efforts from behind the camera, but the softest spot of all would have been somewhere on Keaton’s body, with Close not interested in pulling her punches.
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