Bryce Dallas Howard ‘Very Badly’ Wants to Work with Her Filmmaker Father Ron Howard: ‘Let’s Talk, Dude’

Bryce Dallas Howard is eager to work with her dad!

On Friday, Dec. 6, the actress, 43, revealed during a panel at Steel City Con in Monroeville, Pa., that she has always wanted to work with her Oscar-winning filmmaker father, Ron Howard, 70, on a movie. 

“When I was like 7, I was an extra, but I’ve never worked with him professionally as an actor, with dialogue and all of that,” Bryce said. “But I want to. I want to very badly. And I would always sort of harass him about it. And now I’m like, ‘Let’s talk, dude.’ ”

On the panel, moderated by Michael “Zombo” Devine, Bryce looked back on growing up on her father’s movie sets, saying it “was really my childhood.”

“My childhood was going and spending time with him on set,” she recalled. “For a few reasons. One is I’m the oldest of four, and so I wanted to be on set, and so it just made it easier, one less kid for my mom to be wrangling during the day. So I was really kind of tagging along with him. And also because he was working professionally from the time he was 18 months old, and his parents were in the industry. He just thought it was normal to bring your kid to work every day.”

Bryce added that there were “rules and boundaries” on the sets, but she felt “so lucky” to have had the experience. “I remember trying on the Splash mermaid’s tail and the Cocoon alien’s head,” she shared.

Throughout his career, Ron has won Best Director and Best Picture at the 2002 Academy Awards for A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany.

The patriarch, who has four kids — Bryce, Paige, Jocelyn and Reed — with wife Cheryl Howard, has a film career that spans decades, with his early work including 1984’s Splash, 1989’s Parenthood and 1995’s Apollo 13. His filmography also features The Da Vinci Code, Solo: A Star Wars Story and Hillbilly Elegy. 

Meanwhile, Bryce found success in film and television after being cast in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 thriller The Village. She has since gone on to star in Spider-Man 3, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, The Help, Black Mirror, the blockbuster Jurassic World film series and Argylle.

Like her father, she has also directed several works, including Star Wars-related episodes of The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and the upcoming Skeleton Crew. She made her feature directorial debut with the 2022 documentary Dads.

In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE in March, the actress said her parents would not allow her to act at a young age, unlike her dad’s own career, which saw him landing his breakthrough role on The Andy Griffith Show at 6 years old. 

“I think if I had the chance to act younger, I would’ve taken it. But I wasn’t allowed to,” Bryce said. “My parents were very firm on that boundary, that they were not going to support anyone who wanted to be a child actor.”