‘This one felt special’: Breakfast Club stars mark milestone with 40-year first
The cast of The Breakfast Club has reunited for the first time since the coming-of-age classic movie was released 40 years ago.
The film about five high school students in detention became a cult classic after its release in 1985.
Molly Ringwald, who played teen princess Claire Standish, joined castmates Emilio Estevez (who played Andrew Clark), Judd Nelson (John Bender), Anthony Michael Hall (Brian Johnson) and Ally Sheedy (Allison Reynolds) at the Chicago Comic And Entertainment Expo (C2E2) on Saturday (US time).
“I feel really very emotional and moved to have us all together,” Ringwald said.
“This is the first time that Emilio has joined us. We don’t have to use the cardboard cutout any more, because he’s here.”
Estevez joked that he had also skipped all of his real-life high school reunions. But he said Saturday’s event “was something that finally I felt I needed to do just for myself”.
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“This one felt special – it’s here in Chicago where we made the film, it’s obviously the 40th anniversary, and it just felt like it was time,” he said.
“Somebody told me that Molly said, ‘Well, does Emilio just not like us?’. And that broke my heart. And I went, ‘No, of course I love all of them’. And that just made sense, so here I am.”
Ringwald, 57, revealed that she showed The Breakfast Club to her eldest daughter when she was 10 and said “it changed my parenting, watching it with her”.
“A lot of this stuff went over her head, thankfully, but how it spoke to her, which character she identified with and why, it opened up this incredible conversation,” she said.
“If you would have told me that, when I was 16 years old, one day I would be watching that movie with my 10-year-old and [that would] change the way that I parent. I mean, it’s just mind-blowing.
“Then I watched the movie recently with my 15-year-olds, little more age-appropriate, and I have to say that they didn’t pick up their phones once, which to me, was, that was a win.”
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Nelson, 65, said director John Hughes “explained to us the differences between the young and old”.
“I always felt in a weird way like that the work was half done, that at some point we would all get back together, because there were too many questions by everyone – ‘What happens on Monday?’,” he said.
The question is asked by Hall’s character Brian in a part of the film where the teenagers, who are all from different social groups, become friends and ponder whether their bond will remain intact when they return to school.
“The film is about the fact that everyone has to make that decision for themselves – what happens on Monday,” Nelson said.
“But, in a way, Hughes has been telling us ‘Think for yourself, think for yourself, think for yourself’.”
The cast also considered fan questions – including if The Breakfast Club would be made, or have as much resonance, today.
“Movies today are concept-driven, they’re not character-driven, and the beauty of John is that he focused on characters first,” Estevez said.
“When you think about trying to pitch this movie today — it’s about five kids sitting in a library all day in detention — the studio executives would march you right out the door and say where are the monsters? Where’s the car chases? Where are the big effects?”
He said the 1980s classic had cost $1 million to make – “at the time was still a lot of money but by Universal standards was not”.
“It was not thought of as a big, giant tentpole film as they make today. So there was a lot of risk involved, but by today’s standards, this movie I don’t think would ever get made,” he said.
