Jon Cryer and Andrew McCarthy Have Squashed Their ‘Pretty in Pink’ Beef
Andrew McCarthy’s Brats, a documentary about the collective of ‘80s teen movie stars known as the Brat Pack, comes out in a couple of weeks on Hulu. McCarthy has rounded up a lot of the group’s most famous members to reminisce, including Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Jon Cryer, Lea Thompson and Timothy Hutton. At least one of those names is surprising since Cryer and McCarthy were real-life rivals on the set of John Hughes’ Pretty in Pink.
Cryer got along great with James Spader, Pretty in Pink’s main villain and a guy who’d cornered the market on playing ‘80s teen assholes. But he couldn’t say the same about McCarthy. “I don’t know if Andrew was just trying to keep a little distance,” says Cryer in You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes and Their Impact on a Generation. “I don’t know if he just didn’t take a shine to me or what.”
He wasn’t far off. “Jon was very Duckie-like when we were making that movie,” the book quotes McCarthy as saying. “He was very sweet and very needy, and I had no patience for it.”
Cryer also complained about an emotional scene in which McCarthy and Molly Ringwald wouldn’t make eye contact during his close-ups. Turns out director Howard Deutch told them to behave that way to ramp up the actor’s anger in the scene, but Cryer felt the stand-off treatment left him nothing to work with: “I still kind of never quite forgave (Andrew) for it.”
Until 2012, that is. That’s when the two actors accidentally ran into each other backstage at The View. “We had a lovely time, we had a great talk,” Cryer told the show’s hosts earlier this year. “So thank you!”
As adults, the two actors saw each other in a new light. “(McCarthy) wrote a terrific memoir called Brat. He was already struggling with alcoholism back when we were shooting that movie,” Cryer explained on The View. “I’d projected all this stuff on him at the time; I thought he was this sullen guy that doesn’t want to talk to me. (Our characters are) enemies in the movie, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. But we just had no rapport whatsoever at the time. I found out later he was going through some tough stuff. That was such a lesson for me. It’s all about projection. You never know.”
“Jon Cryer has grown into the most lovely, gracious man,” replied McCarthy in a statement when Entertainment Weekly reached out for his reaction. He only wished that Cryer “hadn’t decked me backstage at The View.”
Kidding, McCarthy was kidding… Probably?