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All five stars of John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club have reunited for the first time in the four decades since the film’s 1985 release.
Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy all took to the stage at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo to discuss the coming of age drama.
The cast walked onto the stage to the “Colonel Bogey March” – the same song their characters whistled in detention at Shermer High School.
Speaking to entertainment journalist Josh Horowitz, Ringwald, who played rich girl Claire Standish in the film said: “I feel very emotional and moved to have us all together.”
Ringwald revealed that, while the rest of the group had previously reunited, the panel marked the first time Estevez had joined them: “We don’t have to use the cardboard cutout anymore because he’s here,” she joked. “I feel really moved that we’re all together.”
Estevez quipped back: “I felt that I needed to do it myself,” adding this reunion felt “special” as the expo took place in Chicago, where The Breakfast Club was filmed.
Elsewhere in the interview, Ringwald and Hall addressed whether they auditioned for their Breakfast Club roles, as they had both previously starred in Hughes’ Sixteen Candles in 1984.
“John just called up and said, ‘I want you to come in.’ He didn’t have a script. He didn’t give me a script,” Hall explained.
“Originally, [Hughes] was gonna do The Breakfast Club before he did Sixteen Candles,” Ringwald added. “And then he wrote Sixteen Candles … and turned it into the studio and they said, ‘Oh, we wanna do that one first.’”
Meanwhile, Sheedy, who starred as outsider Allison Reynolds in the film, opened up about the cast’s relationship on set and how their friendship grew throughout production.
“I was really happy when we were making this movie, we all really … I don’t know if you can tell but we all really do love each other. It was a dream,” she said. “A joyful experience.”
Back in 2018, Ringwald wrote an essay for The New Yorker about rewatching the movies she made with Hughes (which also included Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink) through a post-#MeToo lens.
Elements of The Breakfast Club made her particularly uneasy, specifically a scene played for laughs in which it is implied her character, Claire, is groped beneath her skirt.
Speaking to The Independent, Sheedy said she still loves Hughes’ films but agreed that parts of the film have aged poorly. One element of the film Sheedy said she always disliked was her character’s end-of-film makeover.
It saw Claire transform Allison’s appearance, covering her in blush and eye-shadow and giving her a pink dress and headband to wear.
“You know you really do look a lot better without all that black s**t on your eyes,” Claire tells her. Only after Allison has changed herself does a boy decide to kiss her.
“I never liked the makeover,” Sheedy reflected. “Listen, it was Hollywood in the Eighties. They wanted to take the ugly duckling and make her into a swan.
“As far as I was concerned, that wasn’t what I was doing with that character, but that was what they wanted.”
English (US) ·