Ron Howard is offering a behind-the-scenes account of a scandalous chapter in the making of his 2006 film The Da Vinci Code.

“All of our grip equipment and camera equipment was in the Mona Lisa room… and at one point, we were really hurrying, we were behind schedule,” he explained during a Happy Days reunion panel on Friday at Orlando’s MegaCon.

“Tom Hanks didn’t have time to go back to his dressing room to change for the next scene, and so I was giving him some notes about what the next scene was going to be, and he was changing his pants in front of the Mona Lisa,” he continued. “I said, ‘Wait a minute. This is a moment we have to remember… We’ve been under the water with the mermaid, we’ve been weightless with Apollo 13, and now you’re pants-less with the Mona Lisa.”

This isn’t the first time the star or director of the Dan Brown adaptation has discussed Hanks’ trou drop before one of the most famous works of art in the Western canon.

Hanks gleefully recalled the incident in 2022, saying, “It was my 40th-something birthday. We were shooting in the Louvre at night. I changed my pants in front of the Mona Lisa!… They brought me a birthday cake in the Grand Salon! Who gets to have that experience? Any cynicism there? Hell no!”

The Da Vinci Code and its two sequels follow Hanks’s Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of religious symbology who’s pulled into a vast conspiracy after a curator at the Louvre is found murdered, his body arranged to mirror another of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterworks, The Vitruvian Man.

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The film crew was not given permission to film every painting and artwork that’s shown in The Da Vinci Code. Near-identical replicas were produced so that powerful film lights wouldn’t damage the paintings. A replica of the Mona Lisa created for the film was actually sold in a private auction in 2017.

The Da Vinci Code was selected to open the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, a launching pad that eventually propelled the film to massive success at the global box office. The film finished its run with a $760 million global gross over a $125 million budget.

The only member of the cast or crew to be nominated at any of the major awards shows that year was Hans Zimmer, whose score lost at the Critics Choice Awards, Emmys, and Grammys. Hanks returned for the sequel, 2009’s Angels & Demons, as well as the third film in the Robert Langdon film franchise, Inferno, in 2016. NBC released a prequel series, The Lost Symbol, starring Ashley Zukerman as a young Robert Langdon and based on Brown’s fourth book in 2021. The Secret of Secrets, the sixth book in the author’s series, is scheduled for release on Sept. 9, 2025.