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Matthew Broderick says director of his best movie called him “boring”

Matthew Broderick is anything but boring in one of the best '80s movies ever, but it's fair to say that his director wasn't totally convinced to begin with.

Matthew Broderick in WarGames

John Hughes directed many of the best ’80s movies and is beloved as the man behind some of the best rom-coms of that period. But when he first saw Matthew Broderick perform, he declared that the star of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off wasn’t all that interesting.

Matthew Broderick played the fourth-wall-breaking titular bad boy of one of the best comedy movies ever made, skipping school for an anarchic day of hijinks on the streets of Chicago.

Broderick told The Hollywood Reporter he took part in a costume test along with his co-stars, just prior to the start of filming, and he got a less than enthusiastic response from the man behind the camera for what would eventually become a Golden Globe nominated performance.

“We walked around the streets of Chicago in our costumes and they filmed us,” he said. “That was a big drama. When the footage came back, he said none of us were ‘fun to watch’/ We were ‘boring’ in our tests. Actually, some of us he did like, but some he did not, and I was one he did not.”

Broderick said he was “not a total newcomer” at the time, having already made a successful movie with WarGames. “So to have him say ‘I’m not used to having somebody be so dead’, or whatever he said to me, I wasn’t really ‘in it’ or something. That happened and I said: ‘So get somebody you like’.”

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Broderick made it clear that, although Hughes “was not easy-going” on the set, it was because the director “took the work very seriously” and was “nervous it wouldn’t come out right”. The result was one of the best movies of Hughes’ career, and certainly Broderick’s crowning on-screen achievement.

For more ’80s nostalgia, find out how the Succession premiere gave us a lovely Ferris Bueller reunion and why Michelle Pfeiffer was left “humiliated” after a movie audition.

Back in modern times, we’ve got a guide to all of the new movies coming in 2023. Or for more detail, find out everything we know about the Barbie movie release date and the Wonka release date.