The Beloved Musician Who Nearly Played Fonzie On Happy Days

Some great TV shows become great not because every single moving part fits together seamlessly, but because they're adept at narrowly avoiding utter disaster. A prime example of this is Garry Marshall's "Happy Days," the seminal 1970s sitcom that featured everyone from future "The Karate Kid" great Pat Morita to future master director and "Arrested Development" narrator Ron Howard. The show had to dodge a terrible original title and make changes that saved it from early cancellation before it even had a chance to fully establish itself — and as we'll soon discuss, these weren't the only issues that could have felled "Happy Days" early on.

While "Happy Days" was technically about a group of 1950s teenagers transitioning into adulthood and their families, Henry Winkler's uber-cool greaser Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli soon all but hijacked the show, becoming a clear breakout character. Similarly, though the series was well-cast throughout, Winkler's effortlessly cool performance as the effortlessly cool Fonzie became the show's secret sauce. However, in another timeline, we might have gotten a very different version of the character ... played by Micky Dolenz of The Monkees fame, of all people. In a 2025 interview with People, the beloved musician revealed that he not only auditioned to play the Fonz in 1973, but he was actually one of the two finalists:

"I almost got it. Supposedly, it was between me and Henry. He remembers it too. The story I heard is that he was in the waiting room, saw me come in, and thought, 'Oh s***, I'll never get this — Micky Dolenz is here!' So we laugh about it now. He's a good friend and a brilliant talent."

Both an openly fabricated The Beatles expy group and an openly zany TV series about said group, The Monkees was Micky Dolenz's second major performing gig after a stint as a child actor in the mid-1950s traveling circus show "Circus Boy." This sort of acting CV might not have made him an obvious choice for a role like Arthur Fonzarelli, and in hindsight, casting him could have been somewhat disastrous. After all, even the Winkler version of the Fonz transitioned from a genuinely cool (and low-key tragic, thanks to the character's difficult family history) greaser figure into a caricature whose antics became the origin story of the phrase "jump the shark." With Dolenz and his history with the frenetic chaos of The Monkees, this character degeneration might have happened far sooner.

Or, then again, it might not have. Only the people who witnessed his audition knew what Dolenz would have brought to the role, but it clearly impressed them enough to propel him very close to the finish line. However, if you ask Dolenz himself, "Happy Days" would definitely have shot itself in the foot if it had cast him instead of Winkler. As he told People:

"Oh my God, he's just so good. I was definitely not as good as he was. Come on — he was The Fonz! He had that New York, New Jersey thing down. I'm from Southern California. It wasn't gonna happen!"