Ron Howard is ‘Surprised’ by J.D. Vance’s Embrace of Trump After Directing His Biopic: ‘He Didn’t Like Him at All’

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Director Ron Howard said he was “surprised” to see J.D. Vance embrace former President Donald Trump after he got to know him while filming his biopic.

Howard directed 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy, which chronicles Vance’s life in poverty as the son of a single mother with an addiction to drugs. The film is based on Vance’s 2016 memoir of the same name.

Vance’s history of sharing negative comments about Trump is well-documented. Some of those comments were unsuccessfully used against him during Ohio’s GOP Senate primary.

Howard got an inside look at the now-Senator-elect’s mind while they filmed Elegy in 2020. According to Howard, Vance was not a fan of Trump as recently as two years ago.

Asked by Variety in Los Angeles about Vance’s relationship with Trump, the Oscar-winner said, “To be honest, I was surprised.”

“When I was getting to know J.D., we didn’t talk politics because I wasn’t interested in that about his life,” Howard told the publication. “I was interested in his childhood and navigating the particulars of his family and his culture so that’s what we focused on in our conversation. To me, he struck me as a very moderate center-right kind of guy.”

The outlet reported:

Howard said that, in the brief conversations they had about politics, Vance said he “didn’t care for Trump.

“He didn’t like him at all, as he tweeted,” he said. “I haven’t talk to him in a couple of years. I hope now that he’s got the job that’ll apply what I think his good common sense to the questions that will come before him.”

Howard added Vance never expressed an imminent desire to run for office during their time together working on the film.

“At the time I was working with him he was concentrating on starting his family and he was becoming a businessman and I asked him about it, he said, ‘Maybe somebody down the road.’ Someday came a little sooner than any of us expected,” Howard said.