Somewhere in your head there is a teenager in a Detroit Red Wings jersey lying on a bed in a dark room, refusing to get up. He is sixteen, maybe seventeen. He is definitely not well. He is going to spend the day being dragged through Chicago by his best friend and he is going to hate every minute of it right up until he doesn’t.
That kid turned 70 on the first of July.
Alan Ruck was born in 1956 in Cleveland, which means that when Ferris Bueller’s Day Off opened on the eleventh of June, 1986, he was 29 years old. Twenty days later he turned 30. He had been playing a high school senior at an age when most people are worrying about a mortgage, and he had been doing it so convincingly that four decades later a good chunk of America still thinks of him as a kid.
Here is the other number. The movie opened on June 11, 1986. This June it turned 40.
He and Broderick were friends before the Ferrari
This is the part people usually get backwards. Ruck and Matthew Broderick did not become friends because of Ferris Bueller. They were already friends when they made it.
They’d worked together on Broadway in Biloxi Blues in 1985, the Neil Simon play, the year before the movie came out. So the thing on screen that everybody credits to good casting, the easy shorthand between two guys who clearly know each other, was not entirely acting. Some of it was just two young actors who already liked each other, handed a script that let them play it.
Broderick is 64 now. He was born in March of 1962, which made him 23 when they shot it, nearly six years younger than the man playing his anxious best friend.
The scene nobody has ever quite gotten over
Ask a room of Americans over 45 what they remember from that movie and you will get the parade, you will get the maître d’, you will get “Bueller. Bueller.” And then somebody will bring up the garage.
The Ferrari. Cameron kicking it, over and over, working himself up to the one act of open rebellion in his entire life, and the car rolling backward off the jack and through the glass and down into the ravine. That’s not a comedy beat. That’s a kid finally saying something out loud to his father, using a car because he can’t use words.
Ruck played the whole arc, from the bed to the garage, at 29 years old.
Forty years later, they made a movie about being old friends
In March of this year, Ruck talked to People about shooting a new film with Broderick, and the quote that got picked up everywhere was the simplest one.
“It didn’t feel like 40 years had gone by,” he said.
Then he added the line that reads like something you’d say to a friend at a bar, not to a reporter.
“I think we made a pact to work together every 40 years. So far so good.”
The film is called The Best Is Yet to Come. Jon Turteltaub is directing, Allan Loeb wrote it, and Mary-Louise Parker and Sutton Foster are in it too. Outlets have described the plot slightly differently from one another, but the shape they agree on is this: a misunderstanding sends two lifelong friends on one last road trip.
Which, if you want to sit with it for a second, is the same movie. Two friends, a vehicle, a day that gets away from them. The difference is that in 1986 the joke was that they were pretending to be young, and now they aren’t pretending about anything.
The film has wrapped. It’s in post-production. No release date has been announced, so nobody knows yet whether we get it this year or next.
What actually happened to that kid
Ruck did not disappear after 1986, which is the fate that took a lot of the eighties teen-movie cast. He worked. Star Trek Generations. Speed. Twister. Then six seasons on Spin City as Stuart Bondek, which introduced him to a whole second audience who had no idea he’d ever been Cameron.
And then, in his sixties, the biggest role of his life arrived. Connor Roy on Succession. The oldest brother. The one nobody takes seriously, who wants to be taken seriously more than he wants anything else on earth. It ran four seasons and ended in 2023, and it made a generation of viewers who were not alive in 1986 look up Alan Ruck’s name for the first time.
There’s a symmetry there that’s hard to miss. Cameron Frye spent a whole movie desperate to be seen by his father. Connor Roy spent four seasons desperate to be seen by his. Same actor, thirty-seven years apart, playing the same wound from opposite ends of a life.
Seventy years old this month, forty years since the Ferrari, and back on set with the guy who was in the driver’s seat.
So far so good, he said. That seems about right.
