Author Jason Klamm tackles a key question about the beloved 1986 John Hughes film.

Who was the real Ferris Bueller? New book sets the record straight

Author Jason Klamm tackles a key question about the beloved 1986 John Hughes film.

By Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt is a writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2024. Her work has previously appeared on Yahoo and in American *Journalism Review* and *The Shreveport Times*.

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April 10, 2026 1:28 p.m. ET

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Matthew Broderick in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off'. Credit:

Matthew Broderick will forever be Ferris Bueller, the mischievous main character of the 1986 John Hughes classic *Ferris Bueller's Day Off*.

In his new book, *Ferris Bueller...You're My Hero: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Day Off*, author Jason Klamm addresses the question, once and for all, of the character's true identity.

The director's son, James Hughes, tells him, "There’s never been any credence to the claims...[that] Ferris was derived or inspired by one person from my dad's past."

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Klamm also says that internet citations that Hughes borrowed the name from a friend of his when he was a kid, Bert Bueller, are false.

"When it comes to most fictional characters," Klamm writes, "we're looking at an amalgam at best, which Hughes was a master at creating. Some specifics are simply evocative and memorable, and stick in a writer's brain until they finally use it for something. Inspiration is a curious thing. No writer gets a spark to write about an idea—no matter how off-the-wall it might be—that she can't relate to, even in a small way. Conversely, basing a character or an idea entirely on someone you know or something they did is not only legally treacherous, it’s uninspired."

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The author notes that there were examples of that for Hughes in the case of *Ferris Bueller*.

In one, a guy named Jackson Peterson, who went to school with Hughes, believes he helped inspire the scene where Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane pretend to be sophisticated adults — Ferris famously poses as Abe Froman, the "Sausage King of Chicago" — while dining at a fancy restaurant.

Peterson says the tight group of friends he and Hughes shared once visited Chicago's conservative Union League Club when they were about 17. Peterson credited his father, who was an attorney.

"We just casually ordered drinks— alcoholic drinks, and they brought them," he told Klamm. "They didn't even ask us about carding, because they knew [who] my dad was.”

John Hughes and Matthew Broderick in 1985.

Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty

The book explains, too, that a younger classmate of Hughes', Ed (yes, Ed!), had been pointed to as Ferris. He had missed a lot of school and claimed to have been "chased down by the principal" because of it, but Ed himself pointed to someone else, an. A.C. Buehler III.

Buehler recalled Hughes' wife having called his home in 1985 and letting them know that he planned to use a variation of their name in his new movie. He offered to let them be extras, and they appeared in the scene at the Art Institute of Chicago.

For what it's worth, the book recounts that Hughes, who died in 2009, had been clear: "I designed the character to be the guy I always wanted to be, and I designed his best friend Cameron to be the kind of guy I usually am."

*Ferris Bueller...You're My Hero: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Day Off* arrives in bookstores June 16.

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