(Credits: Far Out / Georges Biard)
Mon 13 April 2026 22:30, UK
When they’re not required on set, extras are free to spend their time however they like, which saw Ron Howard get a lot more than he’d bargained for when he discovered what was going on behind the scenes.
If there’s one filmmaker in Hollywood who you’d imagine would run a mile after accidentally stumbling upon an orgy on the set of their film, he’d be pretty high up the list, with his nice guy reputation and inherent ‘aw-shucks’ nature hardly painting him as a peeping tom who’d hang around for a good look.
Then again, this is the same Ron Howard who seriously contemplated headlining a porno movie called Opie Gets Laid to both capitalise on his residual fame from The Andy Griffith Show and drum up the financing required to shoot an independent film, so maybe he’s a randy bugger after all.
If the two-time Academy Award winner didn’t flinch when watching his daughter perform in the nude, then why would he be at all bothered by the realisation that the people he’d hired to hover in the background of his picture fancied nothing more than using their lunch break to stage an orgy?
It’s a decidedly X-rated thing to happen to a perennially G-rated actor and director, and it’s even a touch questionable that Howard got a kick out of watching it unfold. Not first-hand, thankfully enough, but the aftermath of the lunchtime liaison remains a mental image he’ll never be able to shake, if he even wants to.
Reflecting on his career, he remembered shooting a Nelwyn village sequence in Willow, which necessitated “the biggest collection of little people aggregated for a movie since The Wizard of Oz“. While it might sound like he subsequently made a sweeping generalisation, he was allowed to, since he had the facts to back it up.
“Culturally, these people are partiers,” Howard elaborated. “On the day when we had, like, the biggest collection, I walked by for lunch, and I saw this Citroën, and it was kind of rocking, and I thought, ‘Wow, they’re doing it in there!’ There’s a couple in there, instead of eating lunch, that’s what they’re doing.’ OK, god bless them.”
However, as he soon discovered, it was much more than a couple. Having proceeded to spend his lunch break doing what it was designed for: namely, eating lunch, Howard walked past the scene of the crime again. “I came back, and it was like a clown car,” he recalled of the participants piling out of the vehicle in their numbers. “I’m telling you, it was an orgy! It was great.”
“Great” may not have been the first word to come to many minds had they witnessed a cavalcade of little people piling out of a Citroën, having decided to maximise their minutes and indulge in some mass fornication while the cameras weren’t rolling, but that’s the way Howard chooses to remember it.
