Henry Winkler commented on how he feels about turning down one of the most iconic roles in Hollywood history while recounting stories from his earlier years as an actor.
The “Happy Days” star said he was offered the lead role of Danny Zuko in the 1978 movie musical “Grease” but ultimately turned it down.
“I was dumb,” Winkler, 77, told People while promoting his new memoir, “Being Henry: The Fonz…And Beyond.”
“I spent so much energy, so much time – I spent so many sleepless nights thinking, how do I not get typecast?” he added. The role went to John Travolta and became a defining point in his career.
When asked if he had any advice for young actors facing a similar dilemma today, he said, “You go with the flow. What you do is you prepare to reinvent yourself. You do something completely different and then come back to center.”
Winkler rose to fame playing The Fonz on “Happy Days” but struggled to find his footing after the sitcom came to an end in 1984. In his book, the actor discussed his struggle with extreme anxiety and undiagnosed dyslexia, which made him feel “inadequate.”
Eventually, Winkler found some successful projects, including being part of five Adam Sandler movies and getting a recurring role on “Arrested Development.” He also became a producer.
“I spent most of my adult life being frightened, on the outside looking like I had it together and mostly being anxious. The biggest lesson, I really now believe today in 2023 looking back, is not only must you be tenacious, not only must you be grateful, but you also have to be flexible,” the actor told People.
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Winkler went into more detail about dealing with a learning disability in an excerpt from his memoir, which he shared with the outlet.
“Even in the midst of ‘Happy Days,’ at the height of my fame and success, I felt embarrassed, inadequate. Every Monday at ten o’clock, we would have a table reading of that week’s script, and at every reading I would lose my place, or stumble. I would leave a word out, a line out,” he wrote.
“I was constantly failing to give the right cue line, which would then screw up the joke for the person doing the scene with me. Or I would be staring at a word, like ‘invincible,’ and have no idea on earth how to pronounce it or even sound it out. My brain and I were in different zip codes.”
He went on to describe how even though his cast mates were “warm and supportive,” he still found the experience “humiliating and shameful.”
“I constantly felt I was letting them down,” Winkler wrote. “I had to ask for my scripts really early, so I could read them over and over again- which put extra pressure on the writers, who were already under the gun every week, having to get twenty-four scripts ready in rapid succession. All this at the height of my fame and success, as I was playing the coolest guy in the world.”
He said initially finding out he had dyslexia made him “so f***ing angry.”
“All the misery I’d gone through had been for nothing. All the yelling, all the humiliation, all the screaming arguments in my house as I was growing up – for nothing… It was genetic! It wasn’t a way I decided to be! And then I went from feeling this massive anger to fighting through it,” he wrote.
