Nearly forty years since its initial release, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” still gets quite a bit of play. Turn your television on during most hours of the day, and the Matthew Broderick-starring comedy is likely to be on. So when the John Hughes classic popped up last week, just a few days before IndieWire’s scheduled interview with star Mia Sara, this writer took some time to catch up on an enduring favorite.
As Sloane Peterson, Sara — just 18 at the time of production, basically still a high schooler herself — is both an iconic cool girl (you’d have to be, to be Ferris‘ girlfriend) and the rare teenager with a real regard for the weight of life itself. If Ferris is the Id of the story, Sloane is the Ego. She’s not just along for the ride, she’s also the one giving actual thought to the deeper stuff that’s unfolding around Ferris’ wacky high-jinks. When Cameron (Alan Ruck) is flipping? It’s Sloane who grounds him, who steadies him.
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Not that Sloane doesn’t have her fun, too. Consider one of my favorite scenes of the film, one of the rare moments in which we see Sloane without Ferris or Cameron, and one wholly emblematic of Sara’s incredible range and impeccable timing. She’s sitting in her classroom, bored out of her skull, waiting for Ferris to break her out. When the school nurse finally appears, Sara engages in a wonderful bit of business: waking up, packing up her stuff, smiling knowingly at a pal, and then delightfully pretending to be surprised that she’s the one being taken out of class. It’s a small moment, but it says a lot.
It’s also the kind of moment we’ve missed over the last decade or so, as Sara took a break from acting after starring in a wide range of projects, from the early Tom Cruise fantasy “Legend” and the Jean-Claude Van Damme sci-fi joint “Timecop” to later offerings like the first “Birds of Prey” TV series and the “Witches of Oz” miniseries. For her first on-screen credit in over a decade, Sara co-stars in Mike Flanagan’s deep-feeling Stephen King adaptation, “The Life of Chuck.”
Told in three chapters, Flanagan’s film follows, well, the life of Chuck. Sort of? Told backwards, the film ostensibly guides us through the painful and rewarding life of everyman Chuck Krantz (played by Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, and Benjamin Pajak at different points in the film). A big part of Chuck’s joy and identity comes from his grandmother, Sarah (Sara), who shows him much-needed affection after tragedy and teaches him how to dance. Sara is lovely in the role, again offering the kind of grace and steadiness she mastered way back when with “Ferris Bueller.”
So, of course, the million dollar question: Why this project? Why now? And how can we make sure we’re not waiting so long again for another Sara performance?
“It’s Mike,” Sara told IndieWire during a recent interview. “Mike Flanagan is a beautiful man and he’s a friend. My husband and I had met him socially and his stunning wife, Kate Siegel, who I think is a genius. We became friends and Mike said [one day], ‘You know what? Come on. Why don’t you want to act anymore?’ And I had lots of reasons, but then he said, ‘Well, what if I asked you to do something?’ And I said, ‘Oh, come on, Mike, for you, I’d do anything.’ He called my bluff.”
Bluff called, Sara said she still approached the project with some nerves, most of them sprung out of being a fan of Flanagan’s large body of work, from other King adaptations like “Doctor Sleep” and “Gerald’s Game” to his popular Netflix series like “The Haunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass.”
“My whole family, we’re such Mike Flanagan fans, so it’s very daunting that I’m a part of this,” she said. “Because I’m actually, aside from being his friend, I am a huge fan, which I’m not really of many people. So it was an incredible experience.”
Family was also top of mind when Flanagan pitched the film, based on the early King novella of the same name, to Sara. That sort of stuff sticks with the actress, who had her first child (son Dashiell Quinn Connery) in 1997, followed by her daughter Amelia with second husband Brian Henson in 2005.
“When Mike spoke to us about why he wanted to do it, he said, ‘This is what I want to make for my kids,’” the actress said. “Mike is a wonderful father, and I have kids, and we talked about that and what we want the world to be like for our kids. Then when he sent [the script] to me, I couldn’t stop crying and I called him through tears and said, ‘Are you kidding? You really want me to do this? Yes, of course. Absolutely.’”
The time-bending and -twisting nature of the script didn’t surprise Sara, but she was struck by how much the structure reflected the emotion and meaning of the story.
“Mike had explained it to me, and it lends itself to the whole theme, which is that our whole life, we all contain so many different stories and lives,” Sara said. “Yes, we’re born, we live our lives, and then we die, but it doesn’t really feel that way to live. We’re always going back and forth and back and forth in our lives and memories and experience.”
Funnily enough, the film isn’t Sara’s first Stephen King joint. In 2006, she appeared in the first episode of the miniseries “Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King.” She’s simply credited as “Beautiful Passenger.” What does she remember of that experience? Not too much, even as she delighted in the new connection.
“I was the lady on the plane!,” she said with a laugh. “I was on the plane, and I was married to the director, so I don’t know if it counts. But that’s right actually. You know what? I did that. But you’re right. I never actually made that connection.” (Yes, Henson directed the episode, one of many collaborations the couple have enjoyed over the years.)
A couple of years before, during another interesting period in her career, Sara starred as Harley Quinn on The WB’s short-lived “Birds of Prey” series, long before synergistic superhero mania overtook Hollywood. It’s one of her last big credits, and one that she recalls extremely fondly.
“I loved doing that so much. I loved it, I really did,” Sara said. “That was pretty much the last thing I did, and it wasn’t because it was a bad experience, it was a great experience and I loved that part. If I could play parts like that for the rest of time, that would be awesome. But it also was right as Brian and I decided to have our daughter, so things happened and I got a kind of different life and it was really great and that was it. I felt like I started acting really young and I was ready to take a break.”
Did she happen to see the “Birds of Prey” film in 2020? No, but I assured her there’s still time to catch up.
“No, I didn’t see it. I wanted to see it. I didn’t. I should have seen it,” she said. “I love Margot Robbie. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to see, I mean, I love Margot Robbie and I would’ve seen it, but honestly, I spend a lot of time with my horse. That’s one of the things I’ve been doing!”
When Sara stopped acting, she had plenty going on: a new baby, her horse, and a burgeoning career as a poet. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t like acting anymore, just that — as she wisely noted — she’d been doing it since she was a kid, and maybe it was time to try some other stuff.
“I started working when I was 14 years old, and from going from always being the youngest person on set and then taking this huge long break and then coming back? It’s wonderful to be older,” she said. “I mean, there are some things that are kind of a bummer, but it’s great.”
In “The Life of Chuck,” Sara spends most of her time with Pajak, who was twelve at the time he filmed the role of “young Chuck.” Sara cannot say enough good things about her young co-star.
“I got in the night before I started rehearsals, and I went to this rehearsal room and there was Benjamin and Mandy Moore, the choreographer,” Sara said. “And Benjamin, I have to tell you, he’s a very talented actor. But that light that you see in him, that intelligence, that spirit, that’s him. He’s an amazing kid. He literally went up to me and he threw himself in my arms and I was like, ‘This kid’s wow. This is great.’ We had so much fun. He is such a lovely, lovely person. It was a very nice, it felt like a really beautiful cycle for me to be there.”
As a former child actor, did Sara have any advice for the rising star? She laughed. “I don’t know, Benjamin’s very curious and he asked me all kinds of questions and I tried to answer them, but I don’t know if he needs any of my advice,” Sara said. “He’s an extraordinary kid. He’s so lovely. So it was an absolute joy to work with him.”
Sara also shares the screen with another legend: Mark Hamill, who plays Sarah’s husband and Chuck’s grandfather Albie. In a film flush with emotions and reveals, it’s Hamill, nearly unrecognizable, who carries much of it.
“Mark Hamill is the coolest guy. He’s just a gorgeous human being. He really is. He was such a delight. I think we just liked each other,” Sara said. “We have friends in common. There’s certain history with my husband, Brian Henson, and with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and all that. So we had people that we could talk about.”
Hamill, of course, has a long history with the Hensons, Frank Oz, the Creature Shop, and the Muppets, spanning everything from “Star Wars” to “The Dark Crystal” and back again. And while Sara and Hamill technically both appeared in “Birds of Prey,” they never shared the screen. “The Life of Chuck” granted that wish.
“He is really a lovely human being, and so it was an instant chemistry. Really, by the end we were like, ‘Oh, is that all?’ We wanted to do more together,” Sara said. “And come on, I’m a child of the ’70s, I get to be married to Mark Hamill, how can I top that?”
So, OK, I had to ask, does she still get recognized for “Ferris Bueller”? “Not anymore,” she said with a little laugh. “I used to. It was always like people would think they went to school with me. They’d say, ‘Wait, don’t I know you?’ Like, ‘No, no.’”
And, yes, I had to ask one more: that scene, my favorite little scene, with Sloane in the classroom, does she remember that one at all?
“I remember that scene! I don’t remember what I was thinking, but I do remember doing that scene, absolutely,” the actress said. “That was so interesting, because I went to a really small school, so it was kind of cool for me. I was not that far from high school, maybe the youngest of that main cast. For me it was like, ‘Wow, is this what a lot of high schools are really like?’”
She added with a laugh, “‘Oh, there’s a lot of people in this room.’ I went to a really small school.”
Now that she’s on the other side of her return to the big screen, Sara doesn’t seem quick to shake it. There’s so much to take away from the film, about the way life works, the people we meet, the choices we make, the path taken and not taken. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you, the kind of thing that was worth the wait.
“What I take from it is that every person we meet, every person has all of these things inside of them, and every person we meet, we affect that person and they affect us,” Sara said. “We’re not always going to recognize that in the moment, but it does make you realize that we have a choice. In every interaction we have, we have a choice. We can be a benefactor or we can be a detractor. We can smile at that person who we pass on the street or we won’t notice them. Each and every one of us is going through that. We all are holding all of that all the time. It’s wild all that we have going on in ourselves. If we can recognize that, if I can recognize that in you, if you can recognize that in me, all the stories, all the people, all the connections, all the missed connections, that’s so cool.”
The big question: how long will we have to wait for another Sara screen performance? Look to Flanagan, who probably won’t need to call any bluffs for the time being. “If Mike ever needed me, I would be there,” she said. “I would be happy to be a Mike Flanagan person, that’s it.”
Neon will release “The Life of Chuck” in theaters on Friday, June 6.
