The Brat Pack hated the name that made them famous — here’s every time they slammed it
Don’t call them brats.
Over the years, the members of the “Brat Pack” — a collection of popular young actors in the 1980s — have made it clear that they weren’t, and in some cases still aren’t, fans of the group nickname.
The phenomenon started with the 1985 New York magazine cover by David Blum. He had a night out in Los Angeles with Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe and Judd Nelson, and decided to coin the now-iconic phrase which was inspired by the “Rat Pack,” a group of entertainers (including Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin) from the 1940s and 1950s.
Estevez, Lowe, Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy make up the Brat Pack, as they all appeared in the ensemble of classic ‘80s films such as “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink.”
Adjacent members include Jon Cryer and Mare Winningham.
While Lowe, 60, has been very complimentary about the Brat Pack title, the rest of the group have been critical of the label and how it negatively impacted their careers in the 1980s.
In the new Hulu documentary “Brats,” McCarthy, 61, rounded up the rest of the Brat Pack (sans Ringwald, 56, and Nelson, 64) to talk about how their lives changed when the iconic phrase was created.
“My career and the career of everyone who was involved was branded to the Brat Pack …I’ve never talked to anybody about what that was like,” McCarthy said in the trailer. “So, I thought it might be interesting to try and contact everyone who was in the Brat Pack.”
The iconic actors do not hold back their opinions on being involved in the Brat Pack in the Hulu doc. And McCarthy even sat down with Blum for the first time about the phrase he coined.
“If you had told me 10, 20, 30 years ago I’d be walking out to see David Blum’s apartment, the writer of the Brat Pack article, I’d say you’re f–king crazy,'” McCarthy began.
“I didn’t dislike any of them — I thought they were all quite nice,” Blum replied. “It’s hard to explain, but I didn’t think at the time, ‘Ugh, these brats.’ At all.”
McCarthy then asked Blum if he thought the Brat Pack title was “scathing.”
“I guess in retrospect, yes. At the time, no,” said Blum. “I was proud of my creation of the phrase. Look, I was 29. I definitely knew it was gonna have a reaction.”
Here are all the times the Brat Pack members hated on the group nickname that put them in the spotlight.
Andrew McCarthy
Of all the Brat Pack members, McCarthy has been the most open about how he’s perceived the Hollywood group label.
The “Weekend at Bernie’s” actor, who wrote, directed and stars in “Brats,” told People earlier this month that the Brat Pack label had “personal ramifications” for all the members.
“Were we brats? We were certainly privileged,” he said. “But there wasn’t anything great about us. We were just in the right place at the right time and represented that seismic change in pop culture. You’re easy prey when you’re exposed in that way.”
McCarthy continued: “We just felt unseen. It felt like I lost control of the narrative of my career. Who wants to be stigmatized and branded and labeled?”
“We all scattered for the hills,” he added. “We didn’t want to be associated with it. It had a long shadow over everyone’s life to a degree.”
In an interview with Us Weekly ahead of the doc’s release, McCarthy said the Brat Pack members “felt sort of, in a weird way, very alone” when they became associated with each other.
“We interpreted it as one thing and the whole rest of the public interpreted it entirely differently. That’s all any of us ever want in life is to be seen, and we suddenly felt unseen in a certain way.”
At the “Brats” premiere at the Tribeca Festival, McCarthy said he considered the Brat Pack label “horrible” back in the day. When he appeared on “The View,” he said he “hated” the Brat Pack title.
McCarthy similarly aired his grievances with being a part of the Brat Pack in an interview with Yahoo! Entertainment on June 10.
“It had a long shadow over us. The interesting thing was the disconnect we felt toward it. It took me personally decades to come around to realize the public was right.”
In the “Brats” doc, McCarthy says he has “PTSD” looking back at when the Brat Pack was created.
“I just thought that was terrible instantly. And it turns out, I was right. The article was scathing about all these young actors. And the phrase being such a clever, witty phrase, it caught the zeitgeist instantly and burned deep and that was it. From then on my career and the career of everyone involved was branded to the ‘Brat Pack.’ “
Demi Moore
Moore, 61, explained that she wasn’t fond of the “Brat Pack moniker” when she appeared on Good Morning America in January.
“It’s really interesting cause you know, the Brat Pack moniker that came about really didn’t have anything to do with us as people, as professionals,” she said. “It was just a clever headline.”
“For me, I didn’t love it, being thought of as a brat because I thought it kind of diminished us as professionals, but I didn’t carry it,” Moore added.
Emilio Estevez
Estevez, 62, had a big issue with Blum naming him in the Brat Pack.
“I thought that it was wildly unsophisticated,” he told Yahoo in 2023. “To come up with that and sort of label us the way he did.”
In 2020, Estevez told the Guardian that the Brat Pack term “will be on my tombstone.”
“It’s annoying because Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon have worked together more than any of us have. We just made two movies and somehow it morphed into something else,” the “Mighty Ducks” star added.
Further shading Blum, Estevez said: “If that’s the one thing he has offered the world, that’s a shame.”
Judd Nelson
Nelson has been the harshest critic of the Brat Pack name. In 2015, he said on “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast” that he regrets not punching Blum when they went out together in 1985.
“I knew there was a problem right away,” the “Suddenly Susan” star recalled. “When this guy’s at dinner, I say to Emilio, ‘Who’s this guy?’ [He said,] ‘Well, he’s a reporter, he’s writing an article on me,’ [I said,] ‘I don’t think he should be here, I don’t like him.’ He’s at the table when I’m saying this.”
“This guy, just something about him, he had a stink to him,” Nelson continued, “and I think that in retrospect, I would have been better served following my gut feeling and knocking him unconscious. I at least would have felt better about the thing.”
Nelson said that “a bad thing” happened to him and the other Brat Pack members after they were grouped together.
“These were people I worked with, who I really liked as people — funny, smart, committed to the work. I mean, no one was professionally irresponsible. And after that article, not only are we strongly encouraged not to work with each other again — and for the most part we haven’t — but it was insinuated we might not want to be hanging out with these people,” he explained. “And it was like, I didn’t know that good friends are so easy to come by in this world that they should be tossed asunder.”
“And to think that we’re some kind of gang, or group!” Nelson added. “I lived in New York City. I don’t go three thousand miles to have a beer. … But it just seemed like we were like fruit picked too soon, and then blamed for being picked too soon.”
“It seems strange to have that subject matter be something for edited entertainment,” he told Us Weekly in March. “Also, like, [McCarthy’s] a nice guy. but I hadn’t seen him in 35 years. And it’s like, I’m not going to [be] like, ‘Hey!’ No, dude.”
Nelson also said: “I don’t even know who’s in the Brat Pack. It’s like, why kind of rebirth something that wasn’t necessarily fun? How can we be experts on something that didn’t really exist?”
Nelson declined to be in the “Brats” doc. However, in the final scene Nelson seemingly makes a cameo on the phone with McCarthy. “Hello? Judd?” says McCarthy.
Anthony Michael Hall
Hall, 56, told Business Insider that the Brat Pack “didn’t exist” and “was a media ploy.”
He recalled, “Whoever was the editor of New York magazine at the time, it was a set up. ‘Let’s get all these guys together and get them talking shit.’ The truth is in that time frame, I was at the very young end of that group. I was literally still in high school. When we did ‘The Breakfast Club,’ Emilio and Judd were in their early 20s and they are going out and having beers and I was a teen. So when they did that article I did feel that was a ploy to get all them yapping.”
“And I also think audiences want the actors that they watch together in projects to be actually connected in life. They expect that,” Hall continued. “People will be like, ‘How are Emilio and Judd?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen them in 14 years.’ “
Molly Ringwald
Ringwald, who also declined to be in the documentary, opened up about the Brat Pack in a Facebook video in 2022.
“I really didn’t like it,” she said. “It was basically the invention of a New York Magazine writer who went out on the town with three actors I had done movies with. Actually, one that I hadn’t. Rob Lowe, Emilio and Judd. And then this term was born.”
“I thought it was a very negative term,” the “Riverdale” star shared. “We were all young actors who were doing well and doing good work and it kind of seemed like a way to bring us down by calling us brats. It felt sort of negative and stuck in a really unpleasant way. Suddenly people were seeing us as brats. All we were were actors who were young and doing movies together. I wasn’t hanging out in nightclubs.
“To have that term attached to me at that age, I found it a little bit unfair.”
Ally Sheedy
Sheedy, 61, told the Independent in 2020 that Blum’s Brat Pack article was extremely far-fetched.
“The ladies weren’t there! I think he got one particular angle when the truth is that the guys would hang out a bit, but we weren’t hanging out as one big group,” she said at the time. “We weren’t young actors running around town spending all our time together. I thought it was a little gossipy and undermining, and I didn’t know that it was going to stick the way that it did. It was uncomfortable for quite a long time.”
