Henry Winkler once dashed his daughter Zoe’s dreams of becoming a reality star.
“Do you remember when I was in the running to be ‘The Bachelorette?’” Zoe, 44, asked her dad on a recent episode of her “What in the Winkler?!” podcast.
“Oh, my goodness, and we put a stop to that,” Winkler, 79, replied. “But only for your protection.”
Zoe also had an opportunity to appear in a docuseries called “Quarter-Life Crisis,” alongside her close friend Kim Kardashian. Though Zoe did some test filming, her dad intervened before it went any further.
According to Winkler he told an out-of-town producer, “It’s so lovely that you’re here. I can suggest some really good restaurants. My daughter is not doing your show.”
To this, Zoe joked that Kardashian is now the “most famous person in the world.”
“I wanted to be an actress, but only to be famous,” Zoe confessed
“The real truth is that you were not cut out to do it,” Winkler said. He then recalled an audition that Zoe went on for a horror movie.
“My agent called me… and said, ‘It would be great if your daughter looked at the script before she went in to audition,” Winkler said.
In the end, Zoe went on to become a teacher, which she called, the “best job and what I always truly wanted to do.”
After graduating from Loyola Marymount University, Zoe worked as a preschool teacher for a decade. She later co-founded This Is About Humanity, a nonprofit that works with frontline humanitarian organizations at the United states-Mexico border.
Zoe and her husband, actor Rob Reinis, share sons, Ace, Jules and Gus.
“When I was growing up, I could always talk to my parents about anything,” Zoe revealed on “The Puberty” podcast in 2022. “And there was one rule at our house — if you told the truth, you wouldn’t get in trouble. And so I really try to keep that in my house.”