Emilio Estevez has reflected on how the “Brat Pack” moniker impacted his career and the other actors under the collective nickname.
Estevez, son of Martin Sheen, appears in the new documentary Brats by fellow Brat Pack member Andrew McCarthy.
The term “Brat Pack” – a play on the Sixties’ Rat Pack that surrounded Frank Sinatra – was coined by journalist Mark Blum in the summer of 1985, after he joined McCarthy, Estevez, Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe and Robert Downey Jr for a night on the town.
They and other up-and-coming actors including Molly Ringwald and Demi Moore were deemed the enfants terribles of Hollywood at the time and often appeared in movies together in the Eighties.
“I get the most upset about it because I had already seen a different path for myself, and I felt derailed. I didn’t do a movie because of it,” Estevez told McCarthy in the documentary. “This was Young Men With Unlimited Capital, which was one of the best scripts I had read in a long time.”
McCarthy admitted he was also asked to do Young Men With Unlimited Capital, but learnt that The Mighty Ducks actor “didn’t want” him to participate in the film.
“I didn’t want to have anything to do with any of us. Do you know what I mean?” Estevez reassured him. “I just didn’t want to do any movies. If it were Judd, I would have said the same thing.
“To be seen again in another film would ultimately and could potentially have a negative impact. Working together just almost felt like we were kryptonite to each other.”
Though he agreed to discuss the Brat Pack with McCarthy, Estevez added that he was “not interested in revisiting” the period in depth. “I think if you’re too busy looking in your rear-view mirror, looking at what’s behind you, you’re going to stumble trying to move forward,” he continued.
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When asked if he wished the Brat Pack name never existed, Estevez said: “That’s a difficult question to answer because you could only know the known. Was it something we benefited from? Maybe. But in the long run, I think we did not. I think there was more damage done by it than good.”
Estevez’s comments mirror those of Ally Sheedy in a 2020 interview with The Independent’s Adam White.
Sheedy told White that the women connected to the quartet by proxy of being in movies with them were sullied by association. “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. 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.”
Brats is out now in the US on Hulu. It will be available in the UK on Disney+ from July 5.
