Mia Sara’s troublesome experience on ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’: “It was a bummer”
In the 1980s, no director was speaking as directly and personally to teens as John Hughes. With movies like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink, he delved into the heartache, camaraderie, and discomfort of being an American teenager more eloquently than anyone else. You could argue for hours over which of his films is the most enduring, but plenty of fans would stake their reputations on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Released in 1986 after Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a cultural phenomenon. It starred a young Matthew Broderick as Bueller, a high school senior who can’t be arsed about going to class and decides to meticulously orchestrate a fake sick day so that he and his friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) and girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) can gad around Chicago in Cameron’s father’s Ferrari. It goes off swimmingly, with just enough danger in the form of the school dean, Ed Rooney, to keep things interesting.
Many of Hughes’s movies have aged poorly, especially those starring female characters. Sexual harassment and objectification are everywhere, making these films tough to watch by 21st-century standards. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is much less problematic in this regard, but that didn’t make it any easier for its female co-star.
“Of the main cast, I was the only actual adolescent, so unfortunately for me, it was like having your most awkward adolescent year forever memorialised,” Sara said in an interview with Total Film in 2010. “The cast were all lovely, but mostly my experience was feeling very out of my depth and, you know, flailing.”
“I wish I could say it was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t for me.”
Mia Sara
She was 18 when the movie went into production, while Broderick was 23, Ruck was 29, and Jennifer Grey, who played Bueller’s sister, was 25. Age gaps feel pretty huge when you’re still in high school, and the people you’re working with are in their 20s, so it makes a lot of sense that Sara might feel as though she was living the life of a real John Hughes character completely separate from the role she was playing.
At the time, she was already a seasoned actor, having appeared on the soap opera All My Children and played Tom Cruise’s love interest in Ridley Scott’s Legend. Working with Hughes and the older cast was a harder task, though, and Sara has less than fond memories of the period. “I wish I could say it was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t for me,” she admitted. “I know, it’s a bummer – but it was a bummer to me at the time!”
Interestingly enough, Broderick didn’t particularly love making the movie either. In a 2023 interview, the star talked about the friction between him and the director, saying that Hughes thought he wasn’t fun enough to watch. Clearly, Broderick hit his stride, or Hughes realised that what he was already doing was perfect. It just goes to show you, though — comedies are rarely the barrel of laughs behind the scenes that they are on screen.
