It's always, 'hey, Ferris, love your wife!'

Matthew Broderick tells Michael Ellison about Oscars, Tonys and Sarah Jessica Parker

Wherever you look, there is another image of his wife - on television, on bus shelters, on billboards all over town. The unshaven man in the red and white striped shirt and the beige cords indicates the magazine rack on one wall of the bustling French cafe in SoHo, a bowl-sized cafe au lait in front of him, the Bill Laswell remix of Bob Marley's Jammin' in the air.

There she is again on the cover of yet another glossy, Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of Channel 4's Sex and the City, an actor who has entered the bloodstream of popular culture. "People are consistently telling me how much they like my wife. That's my cross to bear. You get, 'Hey, Ferris, I love your wife.' At least they remember something. It's hard to walk around with her."

Broderick, of course, is not exactly an underachiever. At 38, he's won two Tony awards for his work on the New York stage (one before the age of 20) and made 30 movies. Now he's set to star in a new Broadway stage version of the Mel Brooks movie The Producers, which opens next month and looks certain to be a hit, and in the film You Can Count on Me, which has had two Oscar nominations. But who could forget his performance in the title role of Ferris Bueller's Day Off?

That was his defining role in the movies, the 1986 slacker film made before Generation X was allowed out without its mother, and he will never be allowed to forget it. "I've made my peace with him," he says. "I'm not sick of it. If people say something in the street I barely hear it. I suppose I'm abstractly happy, but it was 15 years ago." He would just as soon steer the conversation in the direction of his friend since their schooldays, playwright Kenneth Lonergan - once of the Royal Court in London - who is on the Academy Award shortlist for his screenplay for You Can Count on Me.

Right now, Broderick is scouring a large article about his friend in a New York weekly to see if he is quoted anywhere. He is not. "Don't I count at all?" he asks, employing his best self-deprecating tone. This very night the actor is going to see Lobby Hero, Lonergan's new play. His talk is all Kenny this and Kenny that.

Indeed, had they not been friends, it is unlikely that Broderick would have taken the part of Brian, the smalltown bank manager who is possibly even more officious than he is ambitious, in You Can Count on Me. "I probably would never have heard of it. I think probably it would never have gotten through my agent. I hope it would but they might have sent it to me and I didn't read it. I was doing a play at the time and I might not have wanted to bother.

"Now people tell me, 'You're in my favourite movie of the year.' I never expected that. It's such a small movie. We just hoped it would get in the theatres and get distributed." The film has far surpassed those modest aspirations. As well as the screenplay by Lonergan, who wrote the Robert De Niro/Billy Crystal film Analyze This, Laura Linney's performance has earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. It tells the story of a wayward brother and a superficially respectable single-mother sister whose respectively impetuous and staid worlds collide in rural America. The movie has a rare grip on reality raised by superb acting.

The perception of those unaware of Broderick's parallel stage career is that he was a brilliant talent who lost his way in movies, only to rally in Election in 1999 as the teacher warring with Reese Witherspoon's precocious schoolgirl. It was as if Ferris Bueller had grown up to be a stolid, middle-class professional.

"It was just a coincidence," he says. "It wasn't a plan. Election, I just loved the script and I loved having the part. Kenny's was just because it was Kenny's. My career's had its ups and downs really, but suddenly I've had a pretty long movie career. A couple of years ago I had a couple that weren't very good." He mentions The Cable Guy, with Jim Carrey, and Inspector Gadget - "which did make $100m, by the way" - but says it's impossible now for him to discern during the production of a movie how it will work out. "You change and people don't want you to change and somehow you have got to bring people along. There aren't that many of us around that came along in the 1980s." It's not as though he was blamed unduly for these flops but, still, he was affected.

"If you think I killed Godzilla it's kind of unfair. It's all right. I don't know what people were hoping for. The Road to Wellville... it had Anthony Hopkins, Bridget Fonda, directed by Alan Parker. I hadn't been doing all that well and I was thrilled to get it and it just didn't work. It was a terrible movie but I don't think it's anyone's fault. There's no way I would have said, 'No thanks, I don't want to do it.' There's a lot of luck involved.

"I really don't know. I mean, when I did Election, from the time I read it I thought it was great, and it was the same at the read-throughs. But I've had that feeling before and the movie comes out and it didn't work at all."

Broderick is still boyish beneath the stubble and the flecks of grey in his hair. He has been almost 20 years in the movie business and has been on the stage even longer. The first Tony was for Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon, with whom he collaborated frequently. The second, more than 10 years later, was for his musical debut in the Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

He has worked extensively with members of his own family: his first theatre appearance was with his father, James Broderick, who died in 1981 after spending most of his career on the stage; he acted in and directed his mother Patricia's script for Infinity, the biography of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman; and Sarah Jessica Parker appeared in How to Succeed towards the end of its run.

Broderick and Parker married four years ago. "I imagine we will work together again, but we don't have any plans. It would need to be a genuine project. I'm not totally comfortable using a personal relationship. It bothers me. Sometimes I watch a real couple performing together and it's difficult to believe. I mean, a romantic comedy with my wife about a struggling actor and his director wife, and they live in New York, that would be very uncomfortable. It needs to be something foreign from our lives." Off the top of his head, he suggests they could be the competing leaders of two teams of dogs racing across the north pole.

For now, though, Broderick is committed to six months in The Producers, while Parker will be shooting the third season of Sex and the City. She is the show's executive producer, and has won a best actress Golden Globe for her role as Carrie, whose slender frame and cascading tresses are the definitive emblem of a show that has infiltrated contemporary life to a phenomenal extent.

"Television makes you very famous. It's very strange. I've never been around that before. It can be very isolating and worrying. Disguises? We always fight about that. I'm always, 'Put a hat on.' She says, 'It doesn't do any good.' I'm a big hider." Now, for instance, he is wearing a fetching red woolly number on his head but only, it turns out, because it's cold.

"I've been famous for almost more of my life than I haven't been. It's part of my nature, which is eerie. Luckily, I've never been crazy big, where people can't go out and need bodyguards. It's a complicated thing and I enjoy a lot of it. I could have any table in Chicago (where The Producers had its pre-Broadway run) and people wanted to buy me dinner all the time. No check. In New York they let me pay."

Broderick's sister suggested to him the other day that he might find life difficult if he had to contend with it as just another guy on the subway, and he agrees. He does not want to wait for ever for an x-ray or a new passport. But there is another side. "You have a lot of conversations you really don't want to have. It's kind of boring. It's repetitive. Marlon Brando said to me, 'I haven't had an honest moment with a person in 41 years.' All right, you have to consider where that's coming from." Life is not entirely other-worldly, though, and Broderick must still confront some of the same dilemmas as us mere mortals. Such as, which of the women in Sex and the City does he like best? "That's a dangerous question. Sarah, of course. But I guess I'd like to switch around."

The home his parents bought near Killybegs, in County Donegal, when he was a child, does not allow the couple to escape in the way it might once have done, and not just because of a car crash 14 years ago. (Broderick, his Ferris Bueller co-star Jennifer Grey beside him, was driving on the wrong side of the road in Ireland in 1987. Two people in a car coming the other way were killed. He was fined £100 for careless driving.) The people of the west coast of Ireland cannot count among their blessings ready access to chains of multiplex cinemas, but they do have satellite television.

Broderick's self-mocking side allows him to say that he hates to see other people winning prizes but he will be watching the Oscars on TV this time. "I have to watch Kenny. It would be great if Kenny wins an Oscar. He was so enraged when he didn't win a Golden Globe. It can get you. I mean, when people say, 'I never could have done it without....' whatever. I don't like it when someone thanks God. I always thought God should be busier than to do the Oscar fix."

You Can Count on Me is released on March 23.