Don’t you forget about her: Andrew McCarthy explains Molly Ringwald’s surprising absence from ‘Brats’ doc
Don’t you forget about her.
“Brat Pack” member Andrew McCarthy, 61, has cleared up why Molly Ringwald is missing from his documentary “Brats,” out Thursday on Hulu.
“She said she’d think about it and that was really the end of it,” he told Us Weekly.
“Brats” is about the famous group of ‘80s stars, their memories of their heyday and their gripes with that moniker.
The circle of stars associated with the label are Emilio Estevez, Ringwald, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Jon Cryer and McCarthy.
(Tom Cruise, Robert Downey Jr. and Matt Dillon are sometimes also mentioned in association with the Brat Pack, but it’s disputed whether the label includes them, as the movie notes).
The movies include “The Breakfast Club,” “Pretty in Pink” “Sixteen Candles” and “St. Elmo’s Fire,” among others.
Directed by and starring McCarthy, the documentary follows McCarthy as he seeks out his former peers – some of whom he hasn’t seen in several decades, like Estevez – and has honest conversations with them.
Rob Lowe, Estevez, Sheedy and Moore all open up on-screen.
But despite being a central figure in the Brat Pack, with her signature short red coif, Ringwald is conspicuously absent, along with Nelson.
McCarthy told the outlet that she has “a lot to say already in the movie,” via archival footage from her own interviews, but admitted that it “would’ve been great” to speak with her.
“She’s so articulate and insightful about these things,” he explained. “The Brat Pack’s a funny thing. It’s like an octopus — it has these long tentacles you still reach out and you can either feel them as an embrace or as something [else]. People are at different places in their lives.”
McCarthy said that he “wanted to talk to 50 more people” about their experiences in the Brat Pack but “time” and “money” held him back.
On-screen, he noted how hard it was to track down his former compatriots and get them to talk to him.
“Judd is at some undisclosed location and not available and Rob is suddenly in Orlando … My wife said making this movie would be ‘good for my humility’ and now I understand what she was talking about,” he said.
In the film, he also explains onscreen, “I asked Molly if she liked to speak. She said she’d think about it but she’d like to just keep looking forward.”
In April, Ringwald told Variety she felt limited by the Brat Pack label at the time.
“Not everyone was able to write for teenagers as successfully as [John Hughes] did,” she said of the famed director. “And even though I wanted to take on adult material, I was limited because I was still a teenager.”
She added that the label “was kind of a way to dismiss” the actors when they tried to land future roles.
Nevertheless, Ringwald went on to have a steady career with work in “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” the Netflix “Kissing Booth” franchise, “Riverdale” and recent roles in Ryan Murphy’s “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” and “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.”
As for what projects she refuses to do now?
She joked: “I’ve definitely had enough of anything having to do with teenagers.”
