MILWAUKEE — Actor Alan Ruck’s career, even at 67 years old, is as hot as ever. He’s just coming off the conclusion of the Emmy Award-winning streaming sensation, Succession. He’s in a new film, The Burial, with Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Fox. But his visit to Milwaukee is about some of his oldest, and most treasured work.
He was Cameron Frye.
“Frye… Frye…”
Ruck played the melancholy friend to Ferris Bueller in the 1986 classic, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The Pabst Theater will screen the film, and then introduce Ruck for a moderated conversation about the movie and his career.
“I just knew it was a good part in a movie and I was going to be acting with my friend,” Ruck told WTMJ. “Broderick and I had been on Broadway together right before this movie, so we were already friends. It just seemed like a natural extension.”
Ruck calls the plot a love story, “…in a way. Here’s the guy (Ferris). He’s got the world on a string. He can do anything he wants. He has this beautiful girlfriend (Sloane Peterson). He can spend this day that he’s ditching school any way he wants, and what does he decide to do? He decides to cheer up his mopey friend.”
Ruck speaks warmly of the joy he had shooting the film. “I had the most fun pretending to be Mr. Peterson,” and of Director John Hughes. “I think that was something that John did very well is he honored kids’ feelings and their hopes and dreams,” Ruck recalled. “You know you go through stuff when you’re 16, 17, 18 years old, you get your heart broken or whatever, people around you try to comfort you and say things like, ‘You know in ten years, twenty years, you’re not even going to remember this.’ That might be true, but at the time, you’re pretty sure you’re dying.”
Cameron famously declared in the film he was dying, eliciting the response from Ferris, “You’re not dying. You just can’t think of anything good to do.”
The frustration for Ruck’s character boils over shortly after, as he ponders whether to connect with his friend. A single camera for the scene when Cameron wrestles with his emotions in his “piece of sh*t” of a car. “John just said, you know, you gotta get in the car and get out of the car. Get in the car and get out of the car,” Ruck said, describing his direction from Hughes. “He does this to you all the time. He makes you do stuff you don’t want to do. So, let’s see you really show some steely resolve, like, ‘not this time man’ and then just completely cave.”
Rumors emerge from time to time about a sequel to the film. Ruck claims he’s not aware of any real effort to make one, but if there were, “My joke has always been they should wait until Broderick and I are deep into our 70’s. Ferris should be in a nursing home and Cameron should come spring him out for the day and show him one last crazy time. One last crazy day in town. And then at the end of the movie, Cameron dies. That’s what I think we should do.”
WTMJ’s Vince Vitrano will serve as moderator for Alan’s talk back Sunday night at the Pabst. Info on ticket: https://www.pabsttheatergroup.com/events/detail/alan-ruck-ferris-bueller-2024
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