Where Is the Cast of ‘The Breakfast Club’ 40 Years Later?

Remind Staff February 14, 4:38 pm

THE BREAKFAST CLUB, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, director John Hughes, Ally Sheedy on the set, 1985. — Universal Pictures/Everett Collection

Universal Pictures/Everett Collection

Though writer/director John Hughes pumped out films examining the lives of middle-class teens in the 1980s, including Sixteen Candles, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, none of them packed quite the same punch as The Breakfast Club. The dramedy about a group of mismatched teens forced to find common ground while trapped together in Saturday detention, which was released on February 15, 1985, was a blockbuster hit, earning over $51 million on a $1 million budget, and transforming its brain, athlete, basket case, princess and criminal into enormous stars.

40 years later, the film remains a teen classic and a cultural touchstone — it’s hard to go a whole Halloween without catching someone in a John Bender costume, to this day. But where are the film’s Brat Pack stars today? (Hughes tragically passed away in 2009, at the age of 59.) Don’t you forget about them — here’s everything you need to know.

Molly Ringwald (56)

Molly Ringwald attends FX's "Feud: Capote VS. The Swans" New York Premiere at Museum of Modern Art on January 23, 2024 in New York City

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

It’s no exaggeration to say that Molly Ringwald was Hughes’ inspiration. After Sixteen Candles — which was released the year Ringwald turned 16 — Hughes wrote parts in The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink specifically for the teen icon. (Though according to an article Ringwald wrote for The New Yorker in 2018, being Hughes’ muse was not always a good time.)

Ringwald starred in films throughout the ’90s, and more recently has had something of TV renaissance following her role as Archie Andrews’ mother Mary through multiple seasons of Riverdale. She portrayed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s stepmother Shari in Netflix’s 2022 hit Dahmer, and costarred as Joanne Carson in Ryan Murphy’s 2024 show Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.

Ringwald also has a sideline in the literary world: in 2012, she published the novel When It Happens to You, and she works as a French-to-English translator, most recently translating the French memoir My Cousin Maria Schneider in 2023.

Ringwald has three children with her second husband, editor Panio Gianopoulos, whom she married in 2007.

Anthony Michael Hall (56)

Francois Duhamel/©Netflix/courtesy Everett Collection

Anthony Michael Hall was nearly as omnipresent in Hughes’ films as Ringwald, almost always playing the lovable nerd. (His Sixteen Candles character was simply named The Geek.) At 17, he spent a season on Saturday Night Live, where he remains the youngest-ever cast member. Hall starred in The Dead Zone from 2002-07, was in six episodes of The Goldbergs, played Tommy Doyle in 2021’s Halloween Kills, and most recently appeared in Bosch: Legacy in 2023. He will appear in the third season of the Amazon Prime show Reacher, which premieres on February 20, 2025.

In 2019, he became engaged to actress Lucia Oskerova; they welcomed their first child in 2023.

Ally Sheedy (62)

Danny Delgado/Freeform via Getty Images

The “basket case” of Breakfast Club fame, Ally Sheedy, previously appeared in 1983’s Bad Boys and WarGames. St. Elmo’s Fire and Short Circuit further cemented her status before Sheedy broke out from the typecasting mold and won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead in 1998’s High Art. She recently appeared as Carol in two seasons of Freeform’s Single Drunk Female, which she told us was one of her favorite roles. She also appeared as a talking head in fellow Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy’s 2024 documentary, Brats.

In 1992, Sheedy married David Lansbury, nephew of Angela. They had one child, and filed for divorce in 2008.

Judd Nelson (65)

Judd Nelson, Engagement Plan, Great American Family

Everett Collection

Troubled delinquent John Bender is Judd Nelson’s most memorable character, but yuppie Alec Newbury of St. Elmo’s Fire also rated high. He starred as Joe Hunt in 1987’s two-part TV film Billionaire Boys Club (and played that character’s father in the 2018 theatrical remake) and was Brooke Shields’ boss on Suddenly Susan. Nelson costarred on Empire’s first season and most recently appeared in the 2022 thriller The Most Dangerous Game.

In 2024, he told Us Weekly that “I don’t even know who’s in the Brat Pack,” and that being lumped in by the media as part of the group “wasn’t necessarily fun.”

Emilio Estevez (62)

The scion of an acting family years before the term “nepo baby” existed, Estevez played a bad boy in 1983’s The Outsiders and 1984’s Repo Man, before achieving big screen immortality as jock-with-a-sensitive-side Andrew Clark. Estevez was then able to launch into the biggest film career of any of his co-stars, popping up alongside Nelson in St. Elmo’s Fire, as well as Maximum Overdrive, Young Guns, and Men at Work, with brother Charlie Sheen.

But in 1992, he became an icon to a whole new generation — young millennials who flocked to see him play frustrated children’s hockey coach Gordon Bombay in the Mighty Ducks films.

Aside from appearing, like Sheedy, in 2024’s Brats, Estevez most recently appeared on big screens in the 2018 drama The Public, which he also wrote and directed. But he’s hit small screens more recently — reprising the role of Bombay in the 2021 Disney+ TV series The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers.

Estevez has two children from his 1980s relationship with model Carey Salley. He married singer and American Idol judge Paula Abdul in 1992; they divorced in 1994.