Judd Nelson’s curt answer to Andrew McCarthy’s Brat Pack documentary: ‘No, dude’
How can he miss them if they won’t go away?
Judd Nelson says he “politely declined” to be in “Brats,” Andrew McCarthy’s upcoming Hulu documentary about the ’80s-era Brat Pack, of which both Nelson and McCarthy were charter members.
“It seems strange to have that subject matter be something for edited entertainment,” Nelson, 64, told Us Weekly while attending the Children Uniting Nations 24th Annual Academy Awards Celebration & Viewing Dinner on March 10 in Beverly Hills.
“Also, like, [McCarthy’s] a nice guy,” he continued, “but I hadn’t seen him in 35 years.
“And it’s like, I’m not going to [be] like, ‘Hey!’ No, dude.”
It was announced in January that McCarthy, 61, was working on the Hulu documentary about the Brat Pack, so dubbed in a 1985 New Yorker magazine article after the cast appeared together in two movies, “The Breakfast Club” and “St. Elmo’s Fire.”
The main Brat Pack members were McCarthy, Nelson, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Mare Winningham, Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer and Ally Sheedy.
Fringe members, sometimes included in the group, were Timothy Hutton, Tom Cruise, Nicholas Cage and Sean Penn.
McCarthy, Lowe, Moore, Cryer, Sheedy and Estevez, among others, will all be featured in the new project.
The documentary will premiere later this year and will be written and directed by McCarthy, whose 2021 memoir was titled “Brat: An ’80s Story.”
The group’s name was a play on Frank Sinatra’s early-’60s era Rat Pack, which included Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Dean Martin and Joey Bishop.
Nelson confirmed to the outlet that there was a “request” for him to join McCarthy’s Brat Pack documentary, but that he “politely declined” the offer.
“I don’t even know who’s in the Brat Pack,” he told Us. “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?”
He did tell the outlet that the Brat Packers were “friends” at the height of their fame, but that their close relationship was exaggerated, although they “got along great,” he said.
“What was so strange is I lived in New York, then I did a movie with people out here [in LA],” he said. “So it’s like, then I’m hanging out with them … then when the movie’s over, I go back to New York.
“I’m not going to be like, ‘Hey, let’s go to Hard Rock Cafe.’ It’s weird.”
He also said the Brat Packers were encouraged to “keep away” from each other due to the name’s negative connotation.
“They kind of portrayed my generation of actors as being entitled and irresponsible and unprofessional,” he said, “whereas my experience was on time.
“Everyone knew their lines,” he added. “It’s so weird.”
McCarthy’s “Brats” documentary will also include an interview with David Blum, who coined the “Brat Pack” term in his 1985 New Yorker cover story.
The feature was originally supposed to focus on Estevez, but Blum described the Brat Packers as “undeserving, uneducated young actors who party and appear in movies together.”
During a 2015 episode of “The Brett Easton Ellis Podcast,” Nelson said his “gut feeling” upon first meeting Blum — who was invited out to dinner with Estevez and his pals, including Nelson — was to knock him “unconscious.”
“This guy, just something about him, he had a stink to him,” Nelson told Ellis. “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.”