Matthew Broderick

Matthew Broderick has built a career on a particular kind of screen presence: quick-witted, understated and able to shift from youthful confidence to nervous unease without losing his comic timing. Born in Manhattan on March 21, 1962, he trained at HB Studio and found early success onstage before becoming one of the most recognisable young film actors of the 1980s. His first film role came in Neil Simon’s Max Dugan Returns, but WarGames gave him his first major screen hit. As teenage hacker David Lightman, Broderick brought an approachable intelligence to a story driven by Cold War anxiety. Ladyhawke followed, before Ferris Bueller’s Day Off gave him his best-known role. His performance as Ferris made the character’s confidence, charm and rule-breaking feel effortless, establishing a screen persona that later films could play with or turn against him. Broderick showed a more dramatic register as Civil War officer Robert Gould Shaw in Glory. During the 1990s, he moved easily between large-scale studio projects and sharper comedy, voicing the adult Simba in The Lion King, playing Dr. Niko Tatopoulos in Godzilla and taking the title role in Inspector Gadget. The Cable Guy and Election made especially effective use of his mild, reasonable exterior, placing it inside stories with darker comic edges. The stage has remained just as important to his career. Broderick won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for Brighton Beach Memoirs and another Tony for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He later starred with Nathan Lane in the Broadway production of The Producers as accountant Leo Bloom, reprising the role in the 2005 film adaptation. His later screen work has included You Can Count on Me, Tower Heist, Daybreak and No Hard Feelings, while his appearance as himself in Only Murders in the Building earned a Primetime Emmy nomination. Across comedy, drama, animation and theatre, Broderick’s appeal lies in how lightly he carries a performance—even when the character underneath is anxious, compromised or scrambling to keep control.