Judd Nelson had no interest in revisiting his Brat Pack days for Andrew McCarthy’s upcoming documentary, Brats.
“It seems strange to have that subject matter be something for edited entertainment,” Nelson, 64, exclusively told Us Weekly while attending the Children Uniting Nations 24th Annual Academy Awards Celebration & Viewing Dinner on Sunday, March 10. “Also, like, he’s a nice guy, but I hadn’t seen him in 35 years. And it’s like, I’m not going to [be] like, ‘Hey!’ No, dude.”
McCarthy’s ABC News documentary, which is set to air on Hulu later this year, will address the zeitgeist phrase that altered the careers of Hollywood’s biggest young stars from the 1980s. While Nelson confirmed that there was a “request” for him to join the project, he ultimately “politely declined” the offer.
“I don’t even know who’s in the Brat Pack,” Nelson told Us, noting that being a part of the cultural phenomenon wasn’t exactly a bright spot in his career. “It’s like, why kind of rebirth something that wasn’t necessarily fun? … How can we be experts on something that didn’t ever really exist?”
A play on the nickname the Rat Pack made up of actors from the 1960s, including Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, the Brat Pack was first coined in a 1985 New York magazine article, that largely described cast members of two major films released that year: The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. Nelson, McCarthy, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Mare Winningham and Molly Ringwald were all part of the gang, but certain other A-listers were also grouped in as well, such as Timothy Hutton, Tom Cruise, Nicholas Cage and Sean Penn.
While Nelson admitted that those labeled as Brat Pack members were “friends” at the time, their ties were often overstated. “What was so strange is I lived in New York, then I did a movie with people out here [in L.A.],” he explained. “So it’s like, then I’m hanging out with them … then when the movie’s over, I go back to New York. I’m not going to hang [and be like], ‘Hey, let’s go to Hard Rock Cafe.’ It’s weird.”
Nelson added that although the so-called Brat Pack all “got along great” and had “a great time together” while on set — the actor is still close with his Breakfast Club costars, he told Us — they would go their separate ways once the project was over.
And because the moniker garnered so much publicity at the time, Nelson told Us that the young stars were encouraged to “keep away” from each other due to the negative connotation.
“They kind of portrayed my generation of actors as being entitled and irresponsible and unprofessional,” he explained, claiming that the rumors of bad behavior held little truth. “Whereas my experience was everyone was on time. Everyone knows their lines. It’s so weird.”
McCarthy’s documentary will not just feature the Brat Pack themselves, but also journalist David Blum, who coined the term in his New York cover story that initially was meant to serve as a profile on Estevez. In the piece, he described the group as undeserving, uneducated young actors who party and appear in movies together. (Blum shared his regrets about writing the article two years after it was published.)
Over the years, Nelson has been clear in his feelings about Blum. During a 2015 episode of author Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast, he shared that his “gut feeling” was to knock Blum “unconscious” upon meeting him.
“I knew there was a problem right away,” Nelson said of when Blum accompanied him and his friends on a night out. “When this guy’s at dinner, I say to Emilio, ‘Who’s this guy?’ [He said,] ‘Well, he’s a reporter, he’s writing an article on me,’ [I said,] ‘I don’t think he should be here, I don’t like him.’ He’s at the table when I’m saying this.”
He continued, “This guy, just something about him, he had a stink to him, and I think that in retrospect, I would have been better served following my gut feeling and knocking him unconscious. I at least would have felt better about the thing.”
It was Nelson’s standout performance as “criminal” John Bender in The Breakfast Club and his role in St. Elmo’s Fire that shot him to stardom in the 1980s. After the New York magazine article made headlines, most of the Brat Pack weren’t seen together on screen again for decades. The 2000s saw Nelson shifting his focus to TV on programs like Suddenly Susan, CSI, Two and a Half Men, Nikita, Empire and Law & Order: SVU, but none of those appearances featured any other former Brat Packers.
“After that article, not only are we strongly encouraged not to work with each other again — and for the most part we haven’t — but it was insinuated we might not want to be hanging out with these people,” Nelson claimed during his Easton Ellis podcast interview. “And it was like, I didn’t know that good friends are so easy to come by in this world that they should be tossed asunder.”
With reporting by Andrea Simpson
