Andrew McCarthy's Choice for the Best 'Brat Pack' Era Movie Is...?

Andrew McCarthy is on the show talking about his Hulu documentary Brat Pack, and Rich wants to know what it was like to sit across from the journalist who hung that label on him and his friends in the first place. McCarthy says it was a big moment for him too. The reporter was unapologetic but also, McCarthy noticed, on the fence about it the whole time. He jokes that the guy ended up being the fifth Beatle of the Brat Pack, attached to it whether he wanted to be or not.

What the doc gave McCarthy, more than vindication, was affection. He says he did not love that era of his life for a long time, and revisiting it forced him to recognize what a blessing it actually was. They were, as he puts it, the avatars of youth for a generation.

Rich raises his hand. Fifty-six years old, he says, and watching those movies as a kid wondering how he could live like that. McCarthy is honest about the inside view. It did not feel like anything. You were young, you were scared, you were trying to figure out what was happening. The one tangible change he noticed was that women suddenly liked him a lot more than they did the week before. He calls himself, in a perfect deadpan, very viable sexually overnight. Only in hindsight did the cultural weight register.

Rich asks for the avatar film. McCarthy goes with The Breakfast Club. The romance in those movies, he points out, was friendship. Not boy meets girl, not anything else. Friendship. St. Elmo's Fire works the same way. They were romances of friendship, and that is what made them stick.

Rich, of course, has to ask. How were you not in The Breakfast Club. McCarthy laughs. His twelve-year-old son came home and reported that a friend insisted dad was in the movie. McCarthy told him he was not. The kid pushed back, the friend said you were. He still does not know why he was not cast. Just the way it shot out, he figures.

If not Breakfast Club, what is the McCarthy performance he is proudest of from that window. St. Elmo's Fire, no hesitation. The part suited him. Rotten before it is ripe, cynicism layered over vulnerability, a longing for a woman he never told anyone about. Everybody feels that way at twenty-two, McCarthy says. Nobody understands me, I am in love from afar, no one knows.

Rich plugs the new book, Who Needs Friends, an unscientific examination of male friendship across America, McCarthy's fifth as a New York Times bestselling author. The throughline holds. From St. Elmo's to a book about adult male friendship, the romance is still friendship.