Matthew Broderick ‘Never Danced Before’ Shooting the Iconic ‘Ferris Bueller’ Parade Scene
Dancing atop a float in downtown Chicago isn’t that hard, seeing as there’s only two steps you need to learn: first, you twist, then you shout.
Despite going on to become a two-time Tony winner and a bit of a Broadway legend, Matthew Broderick wasn’t born a natural song-and-dance man. Contrary to how most superstars seem to have emerged from the womb with stage-and-screen-ready talent oozing out of their invisibly small pores, everybody who makes the big time had to start somewhere, and nobody becomes a truly great artist without a little help from the masters who came before them.
Director, producer and choreographer Kenny Ortega has helped many a rising star learn the moves that would make them nationally recognized performers, especially from his time directing and choreographing such classics as the entire High School Musical trilogy. In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, Ortega, who worked on the 1985 teen comedy hit Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as both a choreographer and a second unit director, revealed that Broderick initially couldn’t have been less mentally prepared to perform in the film’s famous parade scene, with Ortega describing the non-dancer as a “nervous wreck” before his tutelage.
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Sounds like someone needed to stop and smell the roses.
“Matthew, the first day I laid eyes on him was in a rehearsal,” Ortega recalled of his introduction to the soon-to-be superstar and the man who would have every baby in Chicago shaking it up before long. “He was in a pair of sweats and a T-shirt, and he was a nervous wreck. He was like, ‘I’ve never danced before,’ and I was like, ‘Don’t worry about it. We're gonna figure this out together.’”
Ortega gave Broderick a glowing review as a pupil, saying of the Ferris Bueller star, “He was the most charming, wonderful, sweet man to work with.”
Pretty soon, Broderick was more than ready to gyrate, lip sync, twist, shout and shake it on the biggest stage of his career, which is lucky for everyone involved because he didn’t have any margin of error when it came to Chubby Checker and The Beatles.
“That was my first directing assignment for a motion picture,” Ortega recalled of Ferris Bueller, noting that legendary director John Hughes trusted him a pretty daunting task for his first time: shoot the parade scene. “He gave me 12 cameras. We moved the float into a real parade,” Ortega said of arguably the most iconic sequence in Hughes’ legendary filmography. “And then we got one take. It was such a magical day.”
Ten years later, Broderick would take home the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his work on How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but Broadway audiences would have never gotten to see Ferris Bueller twirl across the stage if Ortega never gave him the confidence to confront his fears — and he didn’t even need to smash his dad’s Ferrari to do it.
