As a young person growing up in the ‘80s, a trip to the movie theater was a magical experience, and iconic films like Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, Mannequin, Less Than Zero, and the like raged at the Box Office. And often, one of my favorite actors at the time, Andrew McCarthy, was a key part of helping to tell these stories. It was a decade of excess and attitude, over-the-top action, and big, bold characters, but McCarthy brought something different to each of his roles.
He represented the nice guy next door; the real person who could actually be your friend. McCarthy brought sincerity and a needed innocence, a naiveté even, to many of his roles, and for me and my friends, that was just what we wanted. Then he serendipitously carved out another creative outlet as a travel writer and an author, now with four books under his belt, including his memoir, Brat: An ‘80s Story, which raises the curtain on his tumultuous youth, when he first became famous, and his newest book, A Walk with Sam, an introspective journey across 500 miles of Spain’s Camino De Santiago with his eldest son. In this conversation, McCarthy takes us back to the beginning, walks us through the middle, and takes us to his life now as an acclaimed author and father.
You knew pretty early that you wanted to be a stage actor. How did that journey start for you?
I was cut from the basketball team in tenth grade and my mom suggested that I try out for the school musical, but I didn’t want to be in the school musical, I wanted to be the point guard. Anyway, so I did the play. I was the Artful Dodger in Oliver! and I walked out on stage, and my life was different after that. I just knew. It was like I woke up, and it sort of felt like, “Here I am.” In that instant, I knew that was what I was going to do. I had no idea how, but I said, “This is what I’m going to do.” There is something wonderful about being young and innocent and naïve, because you don’t know that it’s impossible. Then when it came time to go to college, I applied to NYU to the theater program. My grades were so bad… I was a terrible student. I had no interest in school. But I auditioned; I needed a monologue and didn’t know what that was, so someone gave me this book of monologues and I read one, the first one, and I go, “That one seems good!” and I read it. I got into NYU. I’d done a couple of plays — okay, I feel good when I do the plays, so I want to be in plays. That was as far as my logic went. It never occurred to me to be in the movies.
Your first major role in movies was in Class (1983). How did that come about?
There was an ad in Backstage Magazine, which was the unemployed actor’s magazine, and a friend of mine called and said, “They’re looking for someone 18, vulnerable, and sensitive to be the lead in a movie.” And I had just gotten kicked out of college and I didn’t know how to tell my parents that I was not going back to school in a month, so I went, and I sat there in the hallway at the Ansonia Hotel with 500 other 18, vulnerable, sensitive kids. I walked in and a guy named David Rubin was the casting director, he said, “Come to the office tomorrow.” I was, like, “Really?” My naiveté and my obliviousness was my calling card and it worked! (Laughs) I did a reading with the casting director and then read for the director, and then they said, “Well, now we’re going to put you on video tape.” I was like, “What’s video tape?” Video tape was brand new. I realized, “I can get this job!” So, I just froze. You’re in a room and the video cameras were giant in those days and there were all these flood lights on me, and I just froze. I did a terrible job, and I knew “Well, that’s that. That is over.” And they took the tapes back to L.A. to show people. They got to mine, and the director said, “Skip this kid. He’s terrible.” But, they couldn’t figure out how to press fast-forward. Anyway, they were forced to endure watching my audition one more time. The producer watched it, and he was like, “This guy’s weird! He has crazy eyes.” The director’s like, “No, he’s terrible.” So anyway, they had to sit through my audition again and they couldn’t find anybody for the part, so they brought me in again. And again. I think I auditioned like ten times. And then they flew me out to Chicago, finally. So, I flew to Chicago to do a screen test, because that’s where the movie was going to start in like a week. I was teamed up with Rob Lowe and two other kids. But then I had to fly out to L.A. to meet Jacqueline Bisset for her to approve me, because I was playing her young lover, so I had to go out to her house. I remember it so clearly. Marty Ransohoff, who was the producer, this old school Hollywood kind of guy, with the big comb-over, the big belly, and cigars, like from Central Casting, Hollywood producer: [in a deep gravelly voice] “She’s going to love you, kid! She’s going to love you!” And I’m like, “Oh, okay, Mr. Ransohoff.” “Marty! It’s Marty!” “Oh, okay, Marty.” Anyway, so I go in and sit there waiting for Jacqueline Bisset to come out. Then I heard a toilet flush somewhere in the house, and for some reason that just relaxed me completely. And I went, “Oh! She goes to the bathroom.” So, she came out and we met. I said something — I don’t know what — and she just went, “Oh, he’s cheeky. I like it.” And I was in the movies.
It’s 1983, the movie comes out. It’s your first big movie, and you know it’s going to change your life…
And it doesn’t. (Laughs)
A year went by before you found the next real job. What was going through your mind and heart that year?
I felt like I had blown my opportunity. I was in a weird No Man’s Land because I couldn’t go back to NYU, I didn’t fit in at school anymore. Then I wasn’t really in show business, but trying to get into it. So, it was just a weird, difficult time of like, “Well, what am I going to do?”
Your next big movie, St. Elmo’s Fire also almost never happened for you.
Well, that movie came about because I’d auditioned for a movie called D.C. Cab that Joel [Schumacher] was doing, which was a Mr. T movie. I didn’t get that job, thank God, and Joel remembered me a year later when he was doing his next movie. They asked to see me, so I went in and read, and I instantly knew that part was, like, it made sense to me. And for the first time, I really felt like I could do the role better than anyone else. I just knew, so I did very well, and they wanted me to be in the movie, but the studio was, like, “This kid was in two movies that were failures. Who is this guy?”
And Schumacher went to bat for you and literally got the studio to greenlight you.
They flew me out to Los Angeles again to go to the studio to meet an executive. They put me in the Chateau Marmont and sent a big stretch limousine, because that’s what you drove in back in the ‘80s. So, I was driven over the hill to Warner Bros. and met this studio executive, and Joel was there. I was just terrified. I knew I was there to perform, to impress, and that made me very uncomfortable. So, I just sat there on the couch like a bump on a log and Joel was, like, “C’mon!” The more I was encouraged, and they tried to draw me out, the more I withdrew. I could feel myself like under a rock. There was nothing I could do about it. That’s just how I behaved when I was frightened, I withdrew. So, they sent me home. Joel’s assistant drove me home in his VW. I really realized the irony of arriving in the stretch limo, blowing the meeting, and being driven home in a VW bug. Halfway home, I was like, “I just blew that!” So, I told his assistant how much I wanted to do the part and I was suddenly just pouring out all this, what I should’ve done in the office. The assistant spoke with Joel who later called me up and said, “You’re a jerk.” I said, “I know, I know!” He full-out got me the part. That movie changed my life, because it was successful.
You’re suddenly in a film with a bunch of other young actors, peers, people who have been working: Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy. It’s a great ensemble cast. But you said you felt like you were on the periphery of the popular kids, if you will. Why so?
That was the position I was put in and carved out. I knew that it would suit the role, it would suit my work. I couldn’t have been the center, that would’ve been unsustainable for my personality type, and for the role. You know, a guy who desperately needs these friends but desperately wants to be a loner, too. I liked being on the peripheral. I still do. I wasn’t good at schmoozing and cultivating relationships because I found that mercenary and I was too shy and frightened of people in a certain way, so I wasn’t able to do that. That’s what’s required in a very real way to succeed; Hollywood is a small town in that it’s built on relationships. It was just more the idea of schmoozing and working the room that I was just never going to be able to do. To this day, I have no interest in it. To my detriment? Maybe.
After the film, did you stay connected with any of the other cast members?
I never was able to cultivate and play the game, as it were. My friends were not in show business, and they’re still not, generally. I was just never good at that aspect of the business. I see it with some people, they’ve worked together over and over, and I’m like, “Wow, that’s so great.” I’ve just been finishing making a documentary about the Brat Pack and I went and interviewed a bunch of the folks in the Brat Pack, and I hadn’t seen Rob in 30 years. It was so great to see him because we were not close at all when we were young. We were competitive, we were different. I hadn’t seen Emilio since the night the movie premiered, I haven’t seen Judd to this day. I’ve run into Demi a couple of times. We were all friendly in my experience, but I lived in New York, so maybe that was part of it.
How was it looking back at those ‘Brat Pack’ years with the cast of St. Elmo’s Fire?
The whole Brat Pack thing is kind of interesting in that we hated it. What’s interesting is every single person had the same exact response. Rob, Demi, Emilio, Ally — everyone had the exact same experiences. We just had the rug pulled out from under us. We’d now been stigmatized and labeled and dismissed. Utterly dismissed as lightweights and kids who just wanted to party and had no respect for what they’re doing. Over the years and decades, it’s become this iconic, affectionate term for this moment in time, and we represent that, and it’s become a beautiful thing. Initially, we hated it. I went and interviewed the writer, David Blum, for the documentary and spoke with him about it. It was a totally hostile hatchet job. That’s the way New York Magazine was, though, in the 1980s. That kind of “gotcha” journalism is what people did, and they got Emilio. What I always found so weird was so many of us… if you were to actually look at the article, which I hadn’t until I did that documentary, none of us are in the Brat Pack. It’s Judd, Emilio, Rob, Sean Penn, and Tim Hutton. It’s so interesting how certain people got sucked into it that weren’t even in the article, and other people who were, were able to escape. When St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink came out, that was that. Emilio said, when I was talking to him about it, he said it was like we were all kryptonite to each other, the second that [label] came out. That’s when those young ensemble movies stopped happening. It altered the trajectory of our careers. For better or worse? I couldn’t tell you. We perceived it as this horrible, negative thing. But at the end of the day, decades later, I’d say it’s a beautiful thing. Had I been in the same movies and the Brat Pack label not existed, I would’ve been some actor who’s in a bunch of ‘80s movies. As it exists now, I’m part of this iconic group of people that captured a moment in pop culture that will forever be beloved by a certain generation. It took me a long time to realize, “that’s fantastic.” It’s a funny thing. I’ve written a book about it; I’ve now made a documentary because it was such a big part of my life. And still to this day, people come up and start talking to me and their eyes kind of glaze over because they’re thinking of their own youth. They’re not even talking to me; they’re talking to their own twenty-year-old self. That moment when their life is a blank slate to be written upon. And I and the rest of the Brat Pack represent that to that generation of people, and that’s a great gift. But it took me decades to get to.
After St. Elmo’s Fire, fame took on a whole different reality in your day-to-day life. How did you handle that phase of your career and of your life as a young actor?
How did I handle it? Not very well. (Laughs) It’s Pretty in Pink that changed my life. St. Elmo’s Fire gave me a career and put me on the map of Hollywood. Then Pretty in Pink changed my life, which I thought was so odd, because at the time, I thought, “This movie is about a girl wanting to go to a dance and make a dress. I mean, who cares?” Turns out I was wrong again. I didn’t even read the script, because I just needed a job, and it was the next job, and it was a John Hughes movie, and he’s big. He’s done The Breakfast Club, so you want to be in his movies. I read the script on the plane going out to L.A. and I discovered that my guy actually ditches Molly and is a jerk at the end. When I landed, I called my agent, “You got to get me out of this movie. This guy is a total wimp, he’s a loser. You got to get me out of this.” She went, “Honey, you read the script.” “Yeah, just on the plane!” Of course, they did a test screening, and we did a reshoot and all that. They reshot it because the audience wanted us to be together in the end, because the movie is a fantasy, a fairy tale, and you have to give her what she wants, and she wanted my character. The rest is history. It’s a simple story, but it certainly changed my place in the world. I was suddenly famous to a generation of people. I found it overwhelming, in a certain way, and some of it was great and lovely and wonderful and I was getting offered jobs. They weren’t particularly the kind of jobs I wanted to be doing, and the Brat Pack label cemented that.
There’s a recurrent theme in your early movie career of people going to bat for you. Whether it’s Pretty in Pink, with Molly Ringwald or Joel Schumacher with St. Elmo’s Fire.
Yeah, I’m blessed. I was so defensive and so frightened, and so hedging my bets, always. In those instances, there was one person who was able to see through. Molly just saw that when I read that scene with her, she said, “Oh, that’s the guy. He’s dreamy.” It was written for the high school quarterback, square-jawed, broad-shouldered hunk, jock kind of guy, the fairy tale prince. John said, “That wimp?” She said, “No, he’s soulful, he’s terrific.” Once John turned the corner, the studio went, “No, we need somebody more of a hunk,” and he went, “Nope, he’s the guy,” and that was that. But yeah, there always was someone.
Your notoriety or fame had its perks. Going out to dinner with Melissa Gilbert and Rob Reiner, going back to Sammy Davis Jr.’s house and hanging out with Liza Minnelli… How did all of that not blow your mind?
Well, Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis blew my mind. I went, “Wow! This is a long way from New Jersey!” That was a fun night, it was great. Again, it was a moment, I happened to be one of the people having that moment in the mid ‘80s. I just wasn’t really that aware of it. I also drank way too much. I began to drink excessively because I hid behind that, it gave me a false sense of courage. Drinking, a funny thing; it eventually turns in on you when you don’t know that it has happened until it’s too late. So, it began to dominate my life until I stopped in the early ‘90s. It took me a couple years to realize I was out of control for several years, then it took me a couple of years to realize I had a problem, then a couple of years to do something about it.
You’re 60 now.
Shocking. (Laughs)
You have three kids, the eldest, Sam, turned 21 in March. You’ve said in the past that you’re not a nostalgic guy, but as the kids have gotten older, do you ever get more reflective?
I don’t think so. I do think that I have more affection for my youth than I ever did. The answer’s no to nostalgia, but a couple of years ago, when I was writing the Brat Pack book, I hadn’t seen Jacqueline Bisset for 30 years. I hadn’t even seen a picture of her. So, I looked her up on the internet and this picture of a 78-year-old woman comes up. It’s beautiful, it’s Jacqueline Bisset, but it was a 78-year-old woman. I was shocked, because in my mind, she was still the 38-year-old woman that I fell in love with when I was doing this movie. To see her, it did something really weird to me. In a second, you go, “Of course, there’s Jackie,” but there’s the instant when I realized I still have harbored this fantasy that my youth was still there, or I could go pick up where I left it off. But no, 30 years have gone by and she’s a 78-year-old woman, you’re not going to stay at her house again and be 22 ever again. So, there was no nostalgia for it, but I realized in some way, I was still harboring these delusions.
So, no mid-life crisis at all.
Well, it depends when you talk to me. I went and did other things. I had a difficult time when I was not getting roles, so I went and became — by accident — a travel writer. That was a real creative revitalization in my life. My life got better after every decade, from 30s, to 40s, to 50s, it got better after every decade. My career didn’t, necessarily, but my life did. Certainly. I had no problem turning 50 — I didn’t even blink — but turning 60 was, “Woah.” That’s the beginning of going toward being old. There’s no youth anymore. The perspective is changing. I’ll let you know where it lands.
You have four books out now; a lot of people don’t necessarily know that about you. How did that all come about?
I started traveling a lot, traveling alone, traveling the world, and travel changed my life and helped me feel safe in the world. It placed me. I met an editor and started writing about travel and became very successful at it quickly because I knew two things: I knew that travel changes people’s lives, and that it changed mine and made me feel safe in the world. The paradox was, the farther away from home I got, the safer I felt. I also knew intuitively how to tell a story, and so I did that and became successful at it, and then it just evolved into books. I’m very happy to sit alone in a room and write a book. People come up to me, and I’m waiting for them to say Pretty in Pink or St. Elmo’s Fire, and I’m about to go, “Thank you,” and they go, “I love your book!” and I go, “Oh! Thank you!” That’s always very meaningful to me.
You had a complicated relationship with your dad. Did that impact how you decided to parent your own children?
My dad was a different guy than I am, and I was very afraid of my father. My children are not afraid of me! A little fear might be useful. (Laughs) I’m a very different person than my dad was, so I’m a different parent. You learn from whatever and hope your kids go beyond you; hopefully I went beyond my parents and my kids go beyond me. When my first son was being born, a friend of mine’s father from the South said he could see the fear in my eyes. He said, “Andy, you just love him and keep him dry.” It’s still the best parenting advice I’ve ever gotten, it really is!
Have they seen any of your movies?
My daughter was 16 and saw the trailer for Pretty in Pink and saw me kissing Molly Ringwald and she said, “I’m not watching that.” My son saw Weekend at Bernie’s a while back and he said, “I love you, dad, but that’s the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen.”
You have a new book out, Walking with Sam, about a 500-mile Camino de Santiago walk that you did with your eldest son. Any reason you never chose something closer to home as a start-off, such as the Pacific Crest Trail or the Appalachians?
(Laughs) Well, on those you have to actually carry a massive load and camp and all that stuff, and that wasn’t going to happen. I walked it 25 years earlier in my own life and that’s what started me traveling the world and travel writing. So, it changed my life, that first trip, and I wanted to do it again with my son. I talked about it a lot with my family and how great it was. What I learned that first trip was how much fear had dominated my life and how it started liberating me from that fear. That changed my place in the world.
So, what motivated you to walk across Spain again?
Once the pandemic started, there was all this fear we were being flooded with. I really felt the fear rise up inside of me like I hadn’t in all those years, and I thought, “Once this thing clears up, I got to go walk across Spain again.” I was half-joking, then it became a reality, and I just took my son with me. He’s cusping adulthood and starting to go out into the world and our relationship had to alter and change from day-to-day parenting him and scolding him and guiding him, to being more equal, kind adults. I thought it was an opportunity to try and transition the relationship in that way. I thought it would do him good and it would certainly do me good. He had just broken up with his first love, so he was heartbroken and in a vulnerable spot. When I said, “Let’s go!” and he went, “Okay.” I literally went into the next room and bought two plane tickets, and a few days later, we were in Spain, because I knew he would change his mind the minute he started to recover. I thought he was in the right spot for it, I was in a right spot for it. I thought our relationship was right for it, and that’s what it grew out of and that’s what the book is about. I’m a travel writer, so it’s a travel book, but it’s more about fathers and sons. The most important thing in my life, I would say, is if my children want to have a relationship with me into their adulthood and throughout their lives; then my life will have been a success. I had no relationship with my father and it’s one of the great failings of my life. It’s important to me, and I thought it deserved a good, long walk. I had the luxury of being with my adult child, walking for 500 miles, having dinner every night, getting sick of each other.
You define yourself as a solo traveler, you like your space and alone time. How was the experience this time round, traveling with Sam and interacting with different people on the trail?
Well, it’s one of the more interesting things with Camino — people come from all over the world to do the same thing. Walking the pilgrimage is interesting, because there’s nothing to discover; it’s all been done before, the discovery is all internal. There’s so much that’s just walking, and long walking just solves and brings you down into yourself in a real way. The first time I walked it alone, about halfway through, I started making friends with people, and I would walk alone during the day, and we’d have dinner at night. It’s the same thing; Sam and I were together for the first half, and then we started to make friends in the second half. So, we would walk alone, sometimes I would walk alone, sometimes Sam would walk with other people, you just find your own rhythm. Ultimately, you’re still together. Part of the joy of the trip, you’re doing the exact same walk, but it’s a very different experience for the person right next to you.
How do you think Sam’s experience differed from yours?
I was working through my own fears — being able to take care of my kid, because I’m responsible for him here. We were walking by a little tiny brick cottage, and it had two little windows, a slate roof, and a chimney with smoke coming out of it, and I looked at him and said, “This looks so cozy, nice, and safe. Sam, isn’t that house fantastic?” He goes, “The only difference between that and a prison is a couch and a fireplace.” The 180 degrees difference! Everyone’s experience is so different. Like, “Oh! That is how you look at it, how you view it. I never would have thought that.” On day two, Sam said, “What’s the point of this f*cking walk?” And on the last day, he said, “Dad, that’s the only ten out of ten thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
