The Breakfast Club Turns 35: Take a Look at the Original Brat Pack Then and Now
It’s been 35 years since a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal reported for detention at Shermer High in the Chicago suburbs, sacrificing a whole Saturday of their young lives and forming, in the process, The Breakfast Club.
The five principal stars of the classic dramedy, written and directed by John Hughes, all ended up as part of “the Brat Pack,” a term first prominently used in a 1985 cover story in New York magazine to describe some hot young (male) things who both worked and partied together.
Though the story referenced more than a few male actors breaking out at the time, and considered the first “Brat Pack” films to be 1981’s Taps (featuring newcomers Sean Penn and Tom Cruise) and 1983’s The Outsiders, the moniker stuck to the core five in The Breakfast Club and a couple other familiar faces from Joel Schumacher‘s St. Elmo’s Fire, which also came out in 1985.
But no one claimed that they all ran in a pack (McCarthy was notably on the outside of the Elmo’s inner circle even then). They were, however, a tribe of actors that (almost all) showed up more than once in these seminal coming-of-age films, akin to the pool of talent directors like Wes Anderson, Christopher Guest and Martin Scorsesehave dipped into multiple times over the years.
“Brat Pack,” itself a play on the 1960s-era Rat Pack, was mainly just a catchy name that stuck. So much so that Vogue came up with a “New Brat Pack” in 2015 consisting of the likes of Justin Bieber, Kendall Jennerand Gigi Hadid, real-life friends who didn’t act together but were growing up in public all the same, aided and abetted by reality TV and/or social media.
What were the chances, meanwhile, that Molly Ringwald, 33 years after she chose Blane over Jon Cryer‘s Duckie in Pretty in Pink, was going to end up in a movie with Andrew McCarthy’s son?
That’s right, she played the mom of Sam McCarthy‘s character in the indie drama All These Small Moments last year.
“So everything comes full circle,” Ringwald told Extra.
Sheedy told NPR in 2010 that it was a “mixed bag” entering her 30s as an actress who was so closely identified with one character, and a teenage one at that, but ultimately she considered it a “blessing,” especially once she saw her daughter’s teenage friends still enjoying the movie 25 years later.
“Not a day goes by,” Sheedy said, “where I don’t have someone come up to me and tell me they were Allison in The Breakfast Club. Literally not a single day.” In 2015, Ringwald told TIME, ” If somebody told me that we would be on the phone talking about it 30 years ago, I don’t think I would have believed you. I always loved the movie, I loved it when I filmed it, I just didn’t know it would have the longevity that it seems to have had.”
Article Courtesy of EOnline
