When Andrew McCarthy was a teen acting student, at New York University, one of his teachers told him, “If you keep smiling like that, you’re going to charm us all, and it will be your downfall.” This was at the dawn of the nineteen-eighties, a decade that McCarthy stamped with his genial screen image in movies such as “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Pretty in Pink,” “Less Than Zero,” and “Weekend at Bernie’s.” He was often cast as the sensitive heartthrob next to some cooler, bigger-haired guy played by Rob Lowe, James Spader, or Robert Downey, Jr. In “St. Elmo’s Fire” (1985), about a circle of twentysomething friends, he was a jaded newspaper reporter who pined for Ally Sheedy. In “Pretty in Pink” (1986), written and co-produced by John Hughes, he was a rich kid who was pined for by Molly Ringwald. Both were part of a wave of ensemble films about the longings of young adults, which introduced a generation of actors who came to be called the Brat Pack, a term that has become synonymous with eighties nostalgia.
But it didn’t start out that way. The phrase was coined in a damning New York cover article, which followed McCarthy’s male co-stars from “St. Elmo’s Fire” on a night out in Los Angeles and portrayed them as entitled fame seekers. McCarthy spent years trying to distance himself from the Brat Pack, even after his leading-man days were over. He continued to act, while finding second and third careers as a travel writer and a television director, with credits including “Orange Is the New Black.” He has written two books, but it took him until his third to revisit the decade that defined him, and that he helped to define. In “Brat: An ’80s Story,” which comes out this week, he recalls his entry into acting and his rapid rise, the alcohol problem that nearly derailed his life, and coming to terms with the Brat Pack label. When we spoke, by Zoom, he was at his home in upstate New York, where he’s spent much of the pandemic. He’s also been directing episodes of the Awkwafina sitcom “Nora from Queens” and the crime drama “The Blacklist,” starring his “Pretty in Pink” castmate James Spader. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You wrote a travel memoir and a young-adult novel before writing your Brat Pack book. Were you putting it off?
People have asked me over the years, “Do you want to write a Brat Pack book?” My answer was always a very quick no. Then, a few years ago, [the Simon & Schuster publisher] Jonathan Karp contacted me, and I went, “Huh. . .” I started writing it on my own, without telling him, to see if I had anything to say. The first book that I wrote was a travel book, but it was really about coming to terms with getting married: wanting to be alone and wanting to be intimate with somebody, and how do we reconcile those things? I learned a lot about my own habits of avoidance in that. I’d actively avoided the Brat Pack for a long time, and I wanted to see what I would learn from it.
What did you learn?
Well, I had some friends read a first draft, and one of them said, “You know what the name of this book is? ‘Brat.’ ” I said, “This book will never be called ‘Brat.’ ” And in that moment I realized, I guess I haven’t done my work, because that is what the book is about. I lived with his very wise note for several months, without touching anything. And then I went back and tried to reconcile how [the Brat Pack label] is pejorative on one hand and a blessing on the other. It’s weird—whatever you were doing at twenty-two, would you want that to be your legacy? It will be mine, to a generation of people. I’m an avatar of their youth, and, in a way, that’s a beautiful thing. It’s about people looking at their youth, when their whole life was a blank canvas—that excitement and that terror. And we were the people that that was projected on.
Have you felt a disconnect between what those movies meant to you and what they meant to the public?
I certainly did for years. I never understood the appeal of “Pretty in Pink.” I thought it was a silly movie about a girl making a dress and wanting to go to a dance. But John Hughes’s movies looked at young people’s struggles as valid and honorable and not to be dismissed by older folks. I look at my nineteen-year-old son, and he’s in love for the first time, and no one has ever been in love before, according to him. We may think the events are trivial as adults, but the emotions are exactly the same, except fully inflamed. So what better moment in life to honor? And teen movies hadn’t necessarily done that before.
It must have been strange to be so many people’s crush, during adolescence especially, when those feelings are extremely powerful.
Well, it’s not like I’m Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt.
No, you were the more accessible nice guy, so people probably felt even more intimacy.
I always say fame changes you on a cellular level. All those self-centered, grandiose thoughts we have as children are rewarded. That isn’t healthy for anyone. Was it weird? It was my life. I mean, it was weird going from being invisible to the opposite sex to suddenly being sprinkled with catnip. I’m not the most outgoing person, so it’s made certain things easier. On the other hand, it exacerbated that feeling of difference.
I imagine that your feelings about the term Brat Pack have evolved over the years.
For sure. I went back and looked at the article again for the first time in thirty-odd years, and it was as incendiary as I remembered. It was a pretty scathing indictment. I think my elbow is on the cover. When I first looked, I went, Oh, man, they cut me out! Then I read the article and went, Oh, thank God they cut me out!
It was your three male co-stars from “St. Elmo’s Fire,” Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Judd Nelson, out at the Hard Rock Café in Hollywood. Why weren’t you invited?
I was back home in New York, and they all lived in L.A. I’ve always been a slightly solitary person. I liked the guys just fine when we were working together. It was after we’d finished the film, so we weren’t still hanging out.
The only mention of you in the article is this line: “And of Andrew McCarthy, one of the New York-based actors in St. Elmo’s Fire, a co-star says, ‘He plays all his roles with too much of the same intensity. I don’t think he’ll make it.’ ” Did you ever figure out who said this?
I’ve spent about zero time trying to figure that out. I was hurt that someone had said it, but it’s just name-calling. I do remember going, Wow, that’s a mean thing to say.
Do you have a guess? There are only three possibilities.
Your guess would be as good as mine.
You never asked Rob Lowe, “Are you the one who said I was intense?”
No. It didn’t occur to me. I think I was in therapy by then and knew enough to just let it go.
You write in the book that the Brat Pack “never really existed at all.” What do you mean by that?
It didn’t exist on a literal level, but it existed hugely in the ether. One of the ironies is that the minute that moniker was levelled, nobody wanted to be in something that could be accused of being a “Brat Pack project,” so suddenly those ensemble movies [disappeared]. That wasn’t the only reason, but that was a part of it. I mean, I’ve never even met some of my Brat Pack brethren.
Which ones?
I don’t know—who’s supposedly in the Brat Pack? Charlie Sheen, Anthony Michael Hall.
You’ve never met Anthony Michael Hall?
No.
How is that even possible?
I guess I operate in a different world. I always lived in New York, and I didn’t particularly hang out with actors. I do a job for eight weeks with somebody, and life moves on.
It sounds like a nightmare, honestly. Here are these three guys out on the town, acting like jerks, and you’re not even there—you actually get dissed by one of them—and yet you become associated with this group for the rest of your life.
