The Untold Truth Of Matthew Broderick
Matthew Broderick has been a household name since his early 20s. In fact, he was just 24 when his most defining movie was released: the 1986 comedy "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," which, all these years later, remains the one film he continues to be most associated with. Yet that's also far from his only role; during the course of a career that's spanned five decades (so far), Broderick has appeared in numerous movies and TV series while continually returning to the stage, his first love, where the two-time Tony winner remains a hot commodity on Broadway.
In his personal life, he's been married to fellow thespian Sarah Jessica Parker since 1997, sharing three children. Speaking with CBS News' "60 Minutes II" back in 2004, Parker praised her husband for his versatility as an actor. "You can't tell me any other man who works in the movies opposite Julianne Moore or Nicole Kidman in a romantic lead. Or even in a character lead, who can then sing and dance on Broadway. And sing and dance really well," she said, adding, "And I can't name anyone else who does what Matthew Broderick does."
Through it all, he's stayed out of the tabloids, keeping his personal life low-key while remaining an in-demand actor in film, television, and stage. To find out more, read on to discover the untold truth of Matthew Broderick.
His dad was a TV star who co-starred with Al Pacino
For Matthew Broderick, pursuing a career as an actor wasn't just a passion, it was also a way to follow in his father's footsteps. In fact, both his parents were connected to that world — his dad, James Broderick, appeared in various films and TV series, in addition to performing in theatre, while his mother, Patricia Broderick, was a painter and playwright. In fact, James was a familiar face to television viewers for his starring roles in cop show "Brenner," which ran from 1959 until 1964, and the drama "Family," airing from 1976 to 1980. He was also known for his film roles, which included co-starring opposite Al Pacino in "Dog Day Afternoon."
In a 2010 interview with Parade, Matthew remembered his dad, who died of cancer in 1982 at the age of 55. "God, he gave me so much," Matthew recalled. "I remember I auditioned for something and didn't get the job and was very disappointed and he said, 'You always say you messed up. Why does it never occur to you that they might have messed up? Maybe you were the best one but they didn't recognize it.' It sounds obvious, but you forget stuff like that."
20 years earlier, Matthew discussed the influence his father had on his own acting career in a 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times, declaring, "He was a lot of the reason I went into acting."
Matthew Broderick was regularly mugged while growing up in NYC
Matthew Broderick grew up in New York City and lived through one of the city's most crime-ridden periods during the 1970s. Appearing on the "Table for Two" podcast in September 2023, Broderick revealed that he experienced that particular aspect of the Big Apple during that era — and not just once.
"I got mugged often!" Broderick told podcast host Bruce Bozzi, adding, "I've been mugged all over the Village, and Times Square, Upper West Side," he added. However, Broderick pointed out that those muggers would often walk away empty-handed. "I never had any money!" he said. In fact, Broderick recalled that he was just a kid when most of those muggings took place, which made his lack of cash at the time perfectly understandable. "I'm talking like 12 [years old] — that's when it happened a lot," he said. "It was mostly other boys just being bullies and getting lunch money or something like that. But sometimes [it was] somewhat scary."
During that time, muggings were so commonplace that a police officer would occasionally visit his school in order to instruct kids on how to conduct themselves while being robbed — the do's and don'ts during a mugging, intended to minimize the chances of being harmed. "He said, 'Always bring money with you. Don't go out with no money, and immediately give it up and try to make the experience as fast as possible,'" Broderick explained.
He's a Broadway baby who won his first Tony at 21
Given his father's vocation as an actor, and his mother's experience writing plays, it shouldn't be surprising that Matthew Broderick made it to Broadway at a fairly young age — making his debut at the tender age of 21 in Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" in 1983. Of course, Broderick was hardly an unknown at that point, having already appeared the film "Max Dugan Returns," and then starring in his Hollywood breakout vehicle, "WarGames."
The young actor made quite an impression on Broadway audiences; later that year, Broderick won his first Tony Award for the performance, and he remains the youngest to ever win the best featured actor in a play prize. In his acceptance speech, he expressed both happiness and melancholy over his win, with the latter due to the passing of his father the previous year. "I'm sad because my father, Jimmy Broderick, did not live long enough to see this," he said somberly. "I think it would have meant a lot to him." That would be first of many Broadway productions in which he'd star, including winning a second Tony for his performance in the 1995 revival of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," and nabbing a Tony nod for "The Producers" in 2001.
"Much of my life is centered on Broadway," Broderick wrote in a 2022 essay for Financial Times, sharing his excitement over Broadway reopening after everything had gone dark during the pandemic. "The theatre is about togetherness and we all appreciate how important that is now," he added.
Matthew Broderick's mom outed his girlfriend's dad
Back in the late 1980s, Matthew Broderick was dating Jennifer Grey — who'd been his co-star in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," playing the sister of his character. Like Matthew, Jennifer also has showbiz in her blood, given that her father is Joel Grey, who won an Oscar for his performance in "Cabaret" — a role he originated on Broadway. In 2015, at the age of 82, Joel came out as openly gay.
His daughter, however, found out about her dad's sexuality far earlier, and from a somewhat unlikely source: her boyfriend's mom, Patricia Broderick, who bluntly informed her that her father was gay, using a homophobic slur to deliver the news. "Perhaps she was offended by my lack of knowing. I don't know what she was thinking. She was, um, she was a tricky personality. I don't know how else to put it," the "Dirty Dancing" star recalled in a 2022 interview with People. "... She just said whatever she believed was the truth — and perhaps she was doing me a solid."
At that particular moment, however, Jennifer felt as if that "truth bomb" dropped by her boyfriend's mother was a full-on assault. "It was an act of aggression," she continued. "... All I know, all I knew at the time was that it felt like it was a sniper attack. The idea was that I was a fool and that everyone knew but me."
He was involved in a fatal car crash in Northern Ireland
By 1987, Matthew Broderick's Hollywood career was in high gear, having just come off the massive success of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Tragedy struck when he and then-girlfriend Jennifer Grey were on vacation in Northern Ireland, and the rental car Broderick was driving collided head-on with another vehicle, killing the two women within it: 30-year-old Anna Gallagher, and her mother, Margaret Doherty, 63.
As Grey told ET in 2022, she was the only witness to what had occurred, given that Broderick was left unconscious and severely injured by the crash. "I thought he was dead," she recalled, admitting that the trauma changed both their lives. "It's just something that you just don't come back from in the same way," Grey recalled.
Broderick, of course, was also deeply impacted by the accident. More than a decade later, he told British magazine Best in 2002 that he'd struggled to cope with the aftermath. "It was extremely difficult coming to grips with what happened, but in time I felt better about that terrible experience. Therapy helped," he said, as reported by the New York Post. That year, plans were made for Broderick to meet with members of the deceased women's family. "Matthew is willing to meet up with them," Broderick's spokesperson said. "There is no ill will — not any sort of anger. The family is seeking some sort of closure."
Matthew Broderick was almost fired from his most iconic screen role
Matthew Broderick's most iconic screen role remains the titular teenager in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." And while it's impossible to imagine any other actor in that role, there was a point when he was pretty sure he was going to be fired.
As Broderick told The Hollywood Reporter's "It Happened in Hollywood" podcast in May 2023, he and his co-stars were filmed for a costume test, wearing the outfits they'd be sporting throughout the movie's single day. When he watched the footage, late director John Hughes was not impressed. "That was a big drama," Broderick said. "When the footage came back, he said none of us were 'fun to watch.' We were 'boring' in our tests. ... That happened and I said, 'So get somebody you like.'" While Broderick recalled that Hughes quickly overcame that particular concern, he revealed he had other clashes with Hughes during filming. "He was somebody who could get angry at you," Broderick remembered.
Interestingly, Broderick initially felt hesitant about taking what became his signature role. That, he told interviewer Bruce Bozzi during a 2020 SiriusXM interview, was because of the character's breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience — something he'd done onstage in "Brighton Beach Memoirs" and its sequel, "Biloxi Blues," and worried would be seen as repetitive. "You know, when you're young or starting out you think, 'I have to do something different,'" Broderick explained.
Ferris Bueller has been both a blessing and a curse
It's no secret that "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" propelled Matthew Broderick to a greater level of stardom than anything he'd experienced to that point. What the actor hadn't anticipated was that he'd wind up being so identified with the free-spirited high schooler that he'd become typecast. "'Hey Ferris,' people will call out to me when I'm in an airport. And I'll say, 'Hi,' and they'll say, 'How come you haven't done anything since?'" Broderick told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. "Now that disturbs me. I've done a lot since then."
That concern ultimately proved to be founded, with Broderick struggling to break free from the shackles of Ferris and demonstrate to audiences that he had other sides of himself to showcase — if only he were given the chance.
"People associated me with younger roles, but I wanted them to come with me and get used to the fact that I'm wrinkly. And it was hard," he explained more than three decades later, in an August 2023 interview with The Guardian. "The '90s were hard," Broderick admitted. "Lots of ups and downs. But I always tried to keep at it, keep my heart in it. Hopefully that keeps you in the game."
Matthew Broderick's complicated first meeting with his future wife
Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker have been together for a long time. They got married in 1997, as previously mentioned, after about five years of dating, and have remained happily wed ever since, welcoming three children — son James Wilkie and twin daughters Marion and Tabitha — along the way. When the two first met, however, the romance wasn't as instantaneous as one might assume.
Parker explained why during a June 2023 appearance on "The Howard Stern Show," recalling how she felt an immediate attraction to her future spouse but didn't act on it. "We were both seeing other people, so it was illegal, and we stayed away from one another," the "Sex and the City" star said. "... We understood that we had to do right by the other people and break up officially. We couldn't be cattin' around."
After they had both broken up with their respective partners, the two went on their first date, which Parker remembered taking place on March 8, 1992. "My memory is that literally months passed when I didn't ask her for a date," Broderick told The New York Times back in 1996. "Your memory is correct," Parker confirmed with a laugh, recalling that when he finally did call her up, he made a big impression. "Then he left a very charming, very self-effacing message on the machine," she said. "You know, 'Hi, it's Matthew Broderick.' You had to use your last name."
Why he and SJP have kept their marriage out of the spotlight
Over the course of the decades this Hollywood couple has been married, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker have fiercely guarded their privacy, keeping their relationship out of the spotlight.
Speaking with The Guardian, Broderick conceded that they'd never actually hatched a specific plan to be as private as they had, it just kind of worked out that way. "Well, it's nothing we ever sat down and discussed," he said. "But I think it evolved and I think it's important. Once you start talking about your relationship and your feelings in public you're in trouble." Broderick added, "We try to keep some privacy, a circle around the family, so we can all have as normal a life as possible." During a 2020 appearance on SiriusXM, interviewer Bruce Bozzi asked Broderick to share the secrets of their long and happy union. "I don't know the secret at all, but ... I'm very grateful and I love her. It's amazing," he said.
Meanwhile, it's easy to assume that Parker's feelings about Broderick haven't changed significantly since she gushed about him in a 1996 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "He's probably the funniest fellow I've met in my whole life," she said. "He's so bright, so handsome, I think he's the most handsome man I've seen in my life. And he inspires me. I'm mad for him, totally."
He identifies as Jewish but is also half Irish Catholic
While Matthew Broderick's dad came from an Irish Catholic family, his mother was Jewish. And given that his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, is Jewish, and that children raised in such circumstances are considered to be Jewish if the mother is Jewish, it's easy for fans to assume that Matthew is also Jewish.
However, questions were raised about the actor's religious background when his older sister, Janet Broderick, was hospitalized for COVID-19 during the early days of the pandemic, reportedly contracting the virus while attending the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes conference in Louisville, Kentucky. That led many who'd assumed Matthew's Jewish faith to wonder how it was that his sister is Episcopalian. The website Irish Central cleared up the mystery a bit by noting that Matthew and Janet were raised in a non-religious environment, with neither parent apparently passing their respective faith along to their children.
For her part, Parker addressed this when interviewed for the 2005 book "Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish." In an excerpt published by ABC News, she confirmed her husband's Jewish identity. "He identifies as a Jew," Parker explained in part, "but it's much more political for him." The couple also happens to habitually put up a Christmas tree each December. "Matthew and I get one every year, but it has no religious content," Parker said. "... It's about family and ritual — the same things that I respond to in being a Jew."
Matthew Broderick and SJP have only acted together twice
Unlike many actor spouses who've shared the screen, Matthew Broderick and wife Sarah Jessica Parker have never appeared in a film or TV project together. They have, however, acted together onstage — just twice, and more than 25 years apart.
The first time was when they co-starred on Broadway in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" back in 1996. At the time, the couple spoke to The New York Times about their mutual trepidation about acting together. "It's a strange little straddle," Parker conceded. "You wonder, you know? Maybe we won't have any chemistry." For Broderick, he feared that their relationship may hinder the audience's ability to see them as fictional characters, and not a real-life couple. "There's this whole history and you can't really erase that, so I imagine that what we do has to be some kind of interpretation of our relationship," he mused.
More than two decades later, Broderick and Parker reunited on Broadway for a 2022 revival of Neil Simon's "Plaza Suite," proving so successful that they would bring the play to London's West End in January 2024. "Its success is attributed to Neil Simon and Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker," the show's director, John Benjamin Hickey, told Variety. "The play is such a wonderful marathon for two great actors to scale such heights. It's such fun seeing them playing six different characters and they had such a great time doing it."
He knows he's not as famous as his wife — and he's totally cool with it
Having enjoyed longevity in both their marriage and their respective acting careers, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker have each experienced the ebbs and flows that go hand in hand with Hollywood. While Broderick's signature role came early on, Parker's arrived a bit later, when she was cast as Carrie Bradshaw in "Sex and the City," which spawned two hit movies and a 2021 revival series, "And Just Like That."
Carrie, in fact, has transcended her origin as a TV character to become a bona fide pop-culture icon — something that Broderick can't help but realize whenever he stands next to his wife on a red carpet. In fact, ahead of the premiere of "And Just Like That," Broderick told Page Six that he was preparing himself for the onslaught he expected would accompany his wife's return to the world of "Sex and the City." "I think I am ready," he said of being SJP's plus-one at red-carpet events. "I've been training all my life," Broderick joked. "I look forward to it."
Interestingly, Broderick was once offered a role on "Sex and the City" — but turned it down. That role, he told The New York Times in 2020, was one of Carrie's suitors, who had issues with premature ejaculation. "Think of that decision I had to make," Broderick quipped.
He's come to terms with never emerging from Ferris Bueller's shadow
While Carrie Bradshaw has eclipsed all the other roles that Sarah Jessica Parker has played in her lengthy Hollywood career, Ferris Bueller holds a similar place for Matthew Broderick. Speaking with The Guardian, Broderick was asked what he felt his legacy would be. "Well, I'm Ferris Bueller, I suppose," he responded. "I have to accept it. And I like it. I've made my peace with it."
While Parker has returned to her role on multiple occasions, it seems highly unlikely that Broderick would ever revive Ferris — although who wouldn't watch that reboot? Then again, Broderick actually kind of did revive the role — briefly, for a 2012 Honda commercial that aired during that year's Super Bowl. In the spot, Broderick feigns illness while speaking on the phone to a studio exec, so he can take the day off, Bueller-style. "One of the worst performances of my career, and he never doubted it for a second," Broderick says of his ruse, speaking directly to the camera, before embarking on a fun-filled day of hijinks echoing the character's adventures in the film — all while driving around in his Honda CR-V, of course.
Matthew Broderick hilariously spoofed himself in Only Murders in the Building
Matthew Broderick has appeared in enough funny films that his comedy chops have been well established. As it turns out, he also has a healthy sense of humor about himself, something that came into play during the third season of Hulu hit "Only Murders in the Building." In the series, Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez star as a trio of amateur sleuths investigating the murder of an actor (Paul Rudd) in a Broadway musical. When Steve Martin's character — an actor best known for a long-forgotten TV cop show — drops out of the production, Broderick is brought in as a replacement.
In the episode — as detailed in a recap by the Daily Beast — Broderick is depicted as taking a tediously obsessive approach to inhabiting his characters, to the point that he irritates everyone in the cast. "When I did 'WarGames,' I taught myself to write code," Broderick declares in the episode. "For my role in 'Election,' I started teaching high school and dating some students!"
As "Only Murders" co-creator John Hoffman told TVLine, once Broderick learned how he'd be portraying himself, he was all in. "When you tell an actor that they're going to be playing themselves, it brings up a lot of questions," Hoffman said. "He asked, 'How awful am I?' and I answered, 'You're not awful. You're annoying more than anything,' and he said, 'Ooh, that I like!'"