It’s been 40 years since The Breakfast Club first came together, and if that makes you feel old, you’re not alone.
But while the years have come and gone, one thing is for sure: as the stars of the 80s classic film reunited at Chicago’s Comic & Entertainment Expo on Saturday, it revealed they have aged like fine wine.
Taking to the stage as if no time has passed, Molly Ringwald, 57, Judd Nelson, 65, Ally Sheedy, 62, Emilio Estevez, 62, and Anthony Michael Hall, 57, won hearts all over again during a special live taping of Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast.
It marked a major milestone for the cast and the film, which continues to hold an 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
While there was a mini-reunion in 2010, Emilio was unable to make it due to other commitments, but he made sure he didn’t miss this ‘special’ get-together as the cast, crew, and fans celebrated four decades of the hit film.
‘I skipped all my high school reunions, so this was something that finally felt like I needed to do, just for myself,’ he explained to the crowd, as reported by Us Weekly.
‘This one felt special because it’s here in Chicago where we made the film, it’s the 40th anniversary, and I just love all of them [cast], so it just made sense.’
Making fun of her castmate’s past absence, Molly, who starred as Claire Standish, the most popular girl in school in the film, reportedly joked: ‘We don’t have to use the cardboard cutout anymore.
It wasn’t all jokes, though, and she sweetly added: ‘I feel really moved that we’re all together.’
As for how the cast feels about the film all these years later, Emilio, who played the stereotypical athlete Andrew ‘Andy’ Clark, was honest in admitting that while it ‘stands the test of time’, the ‘cross-generational film’ was simply a case of being at the right place at the right time.
The box office would agree, as the film grossed US$45,875,171 (£34,835,540) domestically and $51,525,171 (£39,125,896) worldwide despite its $1 million (£760,000) budget.
In the years since the film was made, the stars have gone on to forge successful careers, with Molly starring in a mix of film and TV shows, including Riverdale and The Bear.
Judd has had more film-based roles, like Girl in the Basement and Billionaire Boys Club. As for Ally, she has dabbled in acting over the years while also working as a professor in the theatre department at the City College of New York of the City University.
Emilio has gone on to both act and direct, earning a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for his work both in front of and behind the camera for the 2006 film Bobby.
Anthony has tried his hand at comedy, starring in Saturday Night Live for a year in the 1980s before experiencing a career resurgence in 2002 with the release of the science fiction series The Dead Zone. Since then, he’s taken on multiple film and TV show roles, including in The Dark Knight, Trigger Warning, and Reacher.
The Breakfast Club follows a group of five high school students who are all sentenced to Saturday detention for different reasons and soon discover they have more in common than they thought.
Directed by the late John Hughes, who died in 2009 after suffering a sudden heart attack at the age of 59, the film didn’t win any major awards at the time of its release in 1985, but it was later selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2016.
Paying tribute to the director, Judd, who played the anti-hero John Bender in the film, said the filmmaker wanted the actors to ‘participate’ in the movie-making process and ‘liked’ the cast – something Judd said he didn’t know was rare until later in his career.
They cast also spoke about the audition process and laughed as they recalled there wasn’t a script, just Hughes asking them some questions.
Meanwhile, Molly recalled how The Breakfast Club was supposed to be filmed before the 1964 film Sixteen Candles, which Hughes directed and she starred in, but the studio decided they wanted it the other way around.
The actress, who was somewhat of a teenage muse for Hughes, had a ‘complex’ relationship with the director and has previously spoken about the impact being his muse had on her life when she appeared on the Reclaiming podcast hosted by Monica Lewinsky last month.
One story she recalled during the chat was that he wrote the Sixteen Candles script after seeing her headshot.
‘He told me that story, but, you know, when you’re that age – I mean, I had nothing really to compare it to. I had done more movies than John at that point, [but] I was still only 15 years old.
‘So I didn’t have a lot of life experience,’ she said, adding that it ‘didn’t seem that strange to me [at the time]. I mean, now it does.’
She continued to say while it was ‘peculiar’, it was simultaneously ‘complimentary. It’s always felt incredibly complimentary, but yeah, looking back on it, there was something peculiar.’
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