Mia Sara, who played Sloane Peterson in the 1986 teen comedy Ferris Bueller's Day Off, has opened up about her negative experience making the film. In a new interview with The Times of London, the actress, now 59, said she doesn't have fond memories of the beloved classic.
Mia Sara's Candid Confession
“I don’t really give interviews because making Ferris Bueller was not that good an experience for me,” Sara told the outlet, as reported by Entertainment Weekly. “But I’m very aware of what a precious thing this movie is, and I don’t want to disappoint people.”
Sara achieved overnight fame as Sloane, the girlfriend of Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick), a wisecracking high school student who skips school for a day in Chicago with his best friend (Alan Ruck). However, she revealed that she “didn’t get along well” with writer-director John Hughes, who also helmed Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club.
Clashes with John Hughes
“John was a strange guy,” Sara told the outlet, reflecting on the filmmaker who died in 2009. “He wanted us all to hang out together and to introduce us to the French New Wave films. But the others were seasoned actors and I was a snotty New York kid and had seen all those movies, so he was frustrated in that desire.”
She added, “I didn’t have the emotional maturity to deal with other people’s egos, or my own.”
Retreat from Acting
After Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sara, who also starred opposite Tom Cruise in 1985’s Legend, retreated from acting, only appearing in a handful of roles. “I never really had the resilience to deal with the audition process,” she shared. “There are some things in my career that I’m really proud of, but overall it was not a happy career for me.”
In the interview, Sara also revealed she had a crush on Broderick during filming. “Yeah, I had no chance!” she said. “It was very much unrequited.”
Family Reactions to Her Role
When she returned to the big screen with a part in last year’s The Life of Chuck, Sara said her role in Ferris Bueller's Day Off was “embarrassing” for her two children. “My kids have absolutely seen it. I think when they were younger, it was just embarrassing,” she told PEOPLE. “My kids, because they grew up in Hollywood, they grew up in Los Angeles, they had a lot of friends whose parents were actors who were still really working all the time, and so they were kind of bummed that I stopped working.”
Sara now prefers to focus her creative efforts on writing poetry. “Mia Sara used to be an actress, but recovered her senses and now she writes,” her website biography reads.
