Although he will forever be associated with Ferris Bueller, maybe the most unforgettable high-schooler in the history of the movies, Matthew Broderick attended the progressive Walden School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and began acting in his teens. “I didn’t have the same experience as Ferris and his friends,” he says. “But I did have friends, and I definitely wanted to skip school.”
In 1985, when he received John Hughes’s script for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Broderick was 23. He had already played the lead in the 1983 film War Games, and now he was on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues, reprising his role as Simon’s alter ego, Eugene Morris Jerome, a character he’d won a Tony for playing in Brighton Beach Memoirs two years earlier. Alan Ruck, making his Broadway debut, was playing Jerome’s best friend.
