In preparation for his documentary about the so-called “Brat Pack,” the group of famous young actors he was grouped together with in the 1980s, Andrew McCarthy held a mini-reunion with fellow brat packer Demi Moore, a co-star on their 1985 film “St. Elmo’s Fire.”
“So great to see (for the first time in years and years) my St. Elmo’s Fire co-star, the wondrous Demi Moore, and catch up for my Brat Pack documentary,” McCarthy, 60, said in a post to his Instagram account on Sunday.
The documentary is based on McCarthy’s 2021 memoir “Brat, an 80s Story,” which focuses on his career in the 1980s and the peak of his fame as an actor. That period coincided with several other young actors who often appeared in one another’s movies, the most often cited being Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy. But the term “Brat Pack” (a pun on Frank Sinatra’s old group of friends, the Rat Pack) got applied to a lot of young and in-demand actors during the period, including Moore, Jamie Gertz, James Spader, Rob Lowe, and Robert Downey Jr, among many others.
McCarthy for his part said in 1999 that he was never really social with the purported members of the group and has generally dismissed the term as basically a media creation.
The two films most often noted as defining for this group are “The Breakfast Club” and “St. Elmo’s” fire, which feature a majority of people said to be in the group. “St Elmo’s Fire” also stars Lowe, Nelson, Sheedy, Estevez and Mare Winnigham and concerns a group of recent college graduates figuring out their lives.
In a Salon interview last week, McCarthy revealed that it’s been decades since he spoke to his former co-stars and that the experience of writing his memoir made him want to get their perspective on the period, hence the documentary.
