Jason Ritter says his late father still shows up when he is acting, sometimes in ways he does not notice until after the scene is over. Speaking on the Wednesday, April 8 episode of Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson, Ritter said there are moments when he feels as if John Ritter takes over.
The actor said the feeling is strongest when he stops trying to force a performance. In auditions, he said, he used to work from material he had practiced “a hundred times,” only to be told to try it a different way and jump off the cliff. Some of his best moments, he said, came when he felt he had not consciously created them. “That definitely happens to me,” Ritter said of those instincts, adding, “That didn't feel like I did that.”
Ritter was speaking from a personal place. John Ritter died in 2003 at 54, in the middle of filming season 2 of 8 Simple Rules. Jason Ritter was 23 then and said he had to work hard to understand that the time he had with his father was the whole story of their relationship. “I was 23. And I was the oldest, so everyone else got even less time,” he said, describing the early feeling that there had to be “more chapters there.”
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He said that view has changed with age. “I'm not aware of all of the ways in which he influenced me,” Ritter said, but he now sees their resemblance more clearly and appreciates the relationship itself more than he did at first. When he watches Matlock, the CBS series he began starring in in 2024, he sometimes catches a flash of his father in his own face and thinks, “Oh my gosh, that was just so his face.”
That connection is not only professional. John Ritter, known for Three's Company, which ran from 1977 to 1984, and for his physical comedy, left behind more than 100 film and TV credits as well as Broadway work. Jason Ritter said people who meet him because of his father often become emotional and tell him how much John meant to them. He also recalled a date with Melanie Lynskey when the pair met a woman at a bar who grew tearful talking about John Ritter. Ted Danson, meanwhile, said his own father can seem to take over when he acts, too.
For Ritter, the thread runs through grief, work and memory at once. “I have ups and downs and grief is such a strange boat to be in,” he said. However it arrives, he said, the past still has a way of surfacing in the present, and for him that now feels less like loss than inheritance.
