😢 Decades later, Happy Days stars shared that Ron Howard was so terrified before the show’s first live audience taping that he hid away, shaking in a wardrobe room. No one expected the young actor to overcome that kind of fear in just a matter of minutes.

Don Most and Anson Williams are recounting the exact moment their Happy Days costar Ron Howard discovered he was “really good at theater.”

While speaking at Fanboy Expo Knoxville’s Happy Days reunion panel in Tennessee on Saturday, July 11, Most, 72, and Williams, 76, revealed that, when the ABC sitcom began filming in front of a live studio audience at the start of its third season in 1975, Howard, 72, was riddled with nerves.

“Donnie, Henry [Winkler] and I, we had done theater and we were excited about this, because every Friday was like opening night, you know, a little nervous, live audience,” Williams recalled. “Ron Howard, on the other hand, had never had never done a stage show.”

As he was reminded of the memory, Most told the audience that he remembered Williams telling him that he “couldn’t find Ron anywhere” on the night of the show.

Until finally, he found Howard, who portrayed protagonist Richie Cunningham, hiding in a wardrobe closet.

“There’s a wardrobe room, and there’s Ron in the corner, shaking, back turned to me,” Williams explained. “And I go, ‘Ron!’ And he just walks out. And kills that night! He found out he’s really good at the theater.”

“That was the beginning of us becoming number one in the world,” he continued of the show, which ran for 11 seasons between 1974 and 1984.

“The other thing that made it great, we rehearsed and could improve the show. It wasn’t like, ‘Here’s the page, just shoot the scene.’ We can improve it. And I think that’s another reason we stayed on a long time, because we were all able to collaborate.”

In June, Winkler, 80, told Ted Danson the same story on his Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, noting that Howard was “almost vomiting” as he struggled to adjust to performing in front of a live audience.

Even so, Winkler added, “When you see him, you would never know. He could do anything, this man.”

While Howard got his start on The Andy Griffith Show as a child actor, where he only had to cater to a single camera, Winkler said during a February episode of the What Matters with Liz podcast that Howard was “one of the best acting partners I’ve ever had in my career.”

“Things would come to me during the show, and I would just do them, I wouldn’t stop my imagination,” he said. “And Ron went wherever I went … It was uncanny, you could not fake it. You couldn’t make it up.”