Alan Ruck Talks Succession, Jumping From Film To TV, and the Twister Sequel
Alan Ruck is most well known for his breakout role as Cameron in the 1986 cult classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Since then, Ruck has solidified himself as a dynamic and adaptable actor featured in over a hundred shows and movies. Surpassing his original film success, Ruck has gained even more popularity for his role as Connor Roy in HBO’s hit television series Succession that has garnered much love during awards season. Pop Culture Planet’s Jordan Bohan had the opportunity to sit down with Ruck to discuss his success as an actor.
With success in both the TV and film space, Ruck shares the sentiment that it isn’t as easy as it looks. “If you're going to have a career, you do what you get a chance to do. You do the jobs that you get offered. I started out doing plays, then I started doing some movies and then I wound up in TV for quite a long time. Now I've been bouncing back and forth a little bit. When I started out years ago, people said TV is where actors go to die. Then starting I guess [in the] early '90s, definitely when The Sopranos hit, all of a sudden there were these shows that kicked that off. It wasn't just episodic. It was a continuing ongoing drama that sucked people in because the writing was terrific and the performances were great.” Ruck shared. “I always wanted to work for HBO someday so I just got lucky. If you stick around long enough, you know, maybe they'll let you in.”
When it comes to his role in the popular hit series Succession, he shared that the role almost didn’t happen for him and that he barely made it to the audition. “I was in Chicago doing a play, flying back and forth to LA, while my wife was working on a show called The Catch. She was working 15 hour days, and when she got home she was being a mother and she was played out. I came back from Chicago and she said, ‘Before you fly back on Monday, I want you to take the baby to Mommy and Me music class,’ and of course, I agreed. Then my manager calls me on Monday morning telling me I have an audition for an HBO show. My wife was exhausted and I said I couldn’t do the audition. I come out of the music class and my phone had blown up. I had a message from my manager saying, ‘Before you go to the airport, go to Adam McKay’s house.’ I went to his house and the casting director was there. I didn’t know the material, but I knew the situation so McKay just told me to just make it up. I improvised my audition, I left and got on my flight to Chicago, and by the time I landed they had offered me the role.”
While Ruck is a member of the infamous Roy family in Succession, his character largely reflects his own experience with the series. “My relationship to the show was sort of like Connor's relationship to the family. I was never involved in the central drama,” he said. “I was always kind of on the outskirts, on the periphery.”
Through the show’s widespread success, it was known for being Sunday night’s must watch series that would be spoiled the next morning if you didn’t tune in. “The tone of the show made itself wildly apparent in the fourth episode of the first season because that was when we had the charity ball and the old man put me in charge of it. I was beside myself with anxiety and I was all messed up about the butter being frozen and all that stuff. When we read that script aloud, people were howling at the table. People from HBO, I mean they were crying,” Ruck shared. “It wasn't just me, it was all the stuff between Tom and cousin Greg, everything. That's when I realized what the tone was and that we were doing this sort of tightrope walk between drama and comedy.”
Ruck is also no stranger to the world of reboots and sequels as one of his roles from the 90s just recently got brought back into the social zeitgeist. In 1996, Ruck played Robert Nurick, nicknamed Rabbit, in the original Twister movie. “It was past tornado season and we were staring at clear blue skies, not a cloud in the sky. Our director would say, ‘You guys are not scared enough! This is the biggest storm, you’re going to die!’ We would make these crazy scared faces and looked like idiots because it was this really silly acting, but when we watched the movie, we all though, ‘I could’ve gone bigger, much bigger,’” Ruck recounted. “They had jet engines and stuff made out of styrofoam that looked like brick and wood. These jet engines would blow your hair straight back and they would throw this stuff in front of you and it would pelt you. It wasn’t that much fun.”
When asked if he had seen the 2024 sequel, Ruck shared, ”No, I didn't go see it. I heard it was very similar to what we did so I didn't.”
