Ally Sheedy’s ‘Breakfast Club’ Brat Pack Label Was ‘Awful’ She Reveals
Actor Ally Sheedy found herself thrust into the spotlight after The Breakfast Club hit, but also suddenly placed in the ’80s “friend group” referred to as the Brat Pack.
Along with actors like Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, and Molly Ringwald, Sheedy starred in a series of movies by filmmaker John Hughes. The Brat Pack tag line stuck, but Sheedy certainly wasn’t a fan. In fact, she said it was a completely fabricated concept.
Ally Sheedy’s fame in ‘The Breakfast Club’ earned her a Brat Pack membership
Sheedy said the term had a “weird energy” surrounding it. “It was awful because first of all, it was a construct, right?” she said on the Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef podcast. “It was a set up how that whole thing happened, which I really don’t want to go into that much, but it was. And then it was just such a flippant sort of title.”
“But I can feel there was this weird energy going,” she continued. “I could feel sort of this, this tide turning against the group of us as in too famous, too fast, too much, too fast. Some sort of feeling in the air. And then there was a lot less hanging out of this particular group that would go on. I felt like everything had been fun and joyful and suddenly everything got very stressful overnight.”
Andrew McCarthy said the Brat Pack was totally fake
Sheedy didn’t want to go into detail about the ’80s friend group. But McCarthy, who wasn’t in The Breakfast Club, but starred in St. Elmo’s Fire alongside Sheedy said the Brat Pack was basically fake. “[The Brat Pack] didn’t exist. It … did … not … exist!” he told The Observer.
“We never hung out–well, they may have hung out. I don’t know their phone numbers! I’ve never talked to a single one of them since we wrapped [ St. Elmo’s Fire ]! It’s all just some lazy f***ing journalist lumping it all together.”
But Lowe claimed in his memoir he was close with many actors in the Brat Pack. “We were all the best of friends. We all really supported each other, and genuinely liked each other, and wanted the other to succeed,” he wrote in “You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried.”
Ally Sheedy found her Brat Pack co-stars were surprised when ‘The Breakfast Club’ became a hit
Sheedy said she and other Brat Pack stars were in shock when The Breakfast Club took off. “We had no idea that it was going to have this life that it has had,” she said. “That was a complete surprise. And it’s still surprising to me that it just has this ongoing life. Nobody had any idea at all. It was really wildly wonderful to work on it because we were one set, the five of us all the time, pretty much living together in a hotel.”
She described the experience as something magical. “I think it was only my fourth movie, but something like that, but it was different.,” she remarked. “And after that, the remaining years of the ’80s, I never had an experience like the Breakfast Club again. It was just so unique. It was just a group of actors. We were at like our little company and it was only about these five actors in this one set with John [Hughes] directing. So thank God.”
“Usually, when you’re filming, it’s a location and there’s a big studio and there’s a whole other framework going on. This was just us creating the movie and the scenes altogether. It felt like John was part of the cast. It has never been quite like that yet,” she added.
