If you’ve seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (and if you haven’t, please remedy that immediately), you’ll no doubt recall the scene where the three teenage truants frolic around the Art Institute. At one point, Ferris’s friend Cameron, donned in a hockey jersey, finds himself mesmerized by the Georges Seurat painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. It’s an iconic moment in an iconic Chicago institution in an iconic Chicago movie. And one that seemed fitting to re-create for the opening spread of our feature on the Blackhawks’ Connor Bedard — with, naturally, Bedard in his own jersey subbing for Cameron in his Gordie Howe Red Wings one.
But would the museum allow us, on a closed Wednesday morning, to set up shop in front of one of its most prized paintings? And would the 19-year-old Bedard, who doesn’t know Ferris Bueller from Frank Boucher, play along? It did, and he did. There were limits for both, though. A museum official took one look at the hockey stick we tried to bring in as a prop and said nuh-uh. And during the cover portion of the shoot, when Chicago design director David Syrek attempted to get a more animated expression out of Bedard by asking him to scream into the camera, the teen superstar looked back at him and simply said, “I don’t scream.”