“Pain in my ass”: Why Alan Ruck came to dislike ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’
Even though he was far too old for the part, Alan Ruck lucked out when he ended up starring in a generation-defining teen comedy that snowballed into becoming a pop culture staple and one of the most beloved movies of its era.
The actor turned 30 years old less than a month after Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released, but fortunately, nobody seemed to notice the guy playing the beleaguered best friend of Matthew Broderick’s title character was a grown-ass man playing a high school student.
Put-upon Cameron Frye was a huge moment for Ruck, but the visibility that came with playing second fiddle to the leading man in a smash hit that earned $70million from cinemas against a $5m budget further cemented John Hughes as the defining voice in mainstream Hollywood comedy, and seized the zeitgeist for the way it spoke to the disaffected youth was a double-edged sword.
It was only his third time ever being credited in a feature, and while being part of such a successful film more often than not opens up doors that were previously locked shut, Ruck discovered to his detriment that trying to squeeze through them in the first place was more difficult than he’d imagined.
In fact, as he explained to Marc Maron, he was beginning to resign himself to the fact things would never get any better than Ferris Bueller. “In those years where I couldn’t seem to scare up any work, I was like, ‘Oh, well. I guess that was my shot’,” he said. “That movie came out in ’86, and then I stumbled around New York.”
Admitting that “things weren’t going great” for him professionally, Ruck conceded how “the Bueller thing got to be a pain my ass when people would bring it up during that period”. He did keep himself plenty busy, though, even if it would be decades before he landed a recurring gig that finally put the shadow of Cameron in his rear-view mirror for good.
Ruck was spied in action classic Speed, disaster blockbuster Twisters, sci-fi sequel Star Trek Generations, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, 140 episodes of popular sitcom Spin City, and countless more movies and TV shows before Succession came along, which gave him the new lease of life he’d always been clamouring for.
As the endearingly oblivious Connor Roy, Ruck would gain recognition from both the Primetime Emmys and Golden Globes for his performance as the oldest of the feuding siblings, and it wasn’t before time. Having voiced his disillusionment with the spectre of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off since the late 1980s, the actor would have been as relieved as he was grateful that, at long last, people who come up to him in the street weren’t guaranteed to ask him about just the one character.
