What happened to ‘The Breakfast Club’ cast members?

Ah, The Breakfast Club – the quintessential 80s teen film. Almost four decades after its release, John Hughes’ masterpiece continues to win new fans with its whip-smart punchlines and tender stories of a group of school friends coming of age, while for those who saw it the first time around, John Hughes’ masterpiece evokes heady nostalgia for days gone by.

But what about the cast? What exactly happened to Claire, Andrew, and the other soon-to-be graduates of Shermer High School? Here’s the lowdown.

Molly Ringwald (Claire)

Molly Ringwald quickly found herself in demand after The Breakfast Club’s success, with Howard Deutch tapping her for Pretty in Pink (1986), which was also written by John Hughes. A slew of coming-of-age comedy dramas of varying quality followed, though Ringwald struck out against the typecasting, turning in a creditable performance as Cordelia in Jean-Luce Godard’s idiosyncratic adaptation of King Lear (1987) and playing the star role in the TV film about AIDS activist Alison Gertz, Something To Live For: The Alison Gertz Story (1992).

Ringwald stepped away from acting around the turn of the 2000s, but returned a few years later, taking a starring role in ABC’s long-running teen drama The Secret Life of the American Teenager (2008-13). Ringwald continues to work steadily in Hollywood; recent appearances include supporting roles in Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and Single Drunk Female.

Emilio Estevez (Andrew)

Though Estevez followed The Breakfast Club with a couple of misfires – 1986’s box office bomb, the Stephen King-directed Maximum Overdrive, is a case in point – his career went stratospheric in the late 1980s, with huge hits in the shape of cop comedy Stakeout (1987), a glorious turn as Billy The Kid in Young Guns (1988) and its sequel Young Guns II (1990), and commercial successes in Men At Work (1990) and Loaded Weapon 1 (1993). For Tom Cruise fans, however, his most recognizable role is as the ill-fated operative Jack in Mission: Impossible (1997).

Since the late 1990s, Estevez has increasingly transitioned to directing. Since directing his debut feature in 1986, Estevez has helmed no less than eight films; the picks of the bunch are 2010’s The Way (in which Estevez directed his father, Martin Sheen, as a pilgrim en route to Spain’s Santiago de Compostela), and 2018’s drama The Public, starring Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater.

Ally Sheedy (Allison)

Teen audiences already knew Sheedy as the friend of Matthew Broderick in 1983’s WarGames. Sheedy worked regularly in film for the rest of the 1980s, and scored a big commercial success in Short Circuit (1986). Sheedy reunited with The Breakfast Club castmate Molly Ringwald for 1990’s Betsy’s Wedding, and – playing against type – in the well-received horror-thriller Fear (1990).

Sheedy went much of the 1990s and 2000s acting in TV and low-budget films; notable credits include guest spots on the 1990s version of The Outer Limits, The Red Shoe Diaries, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and HBO prison drama Oz. Like Ringwald, Sheedy was also a regular on Freeform’s comedy series Single Drunk Female, which ended earlier this year.

Anthony Michael Hall (Brian)

The “brains” of the Breakfast Club, Brian was played by Hall in only his fourth film appearance. John Hughes tapped Hall again later in 1985 for Weird Science, and Hall also appeared as a regular in Saturday Night Live the same year. Hall secured leading roles in a variety of comedies throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as well as a supporting role in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) as Jim, the stuck-up boyfriend of Winona Ryder’s Kim. Hall spent much of the 2000s in the lead role of Paramount’s long-running Stephen King scifi drama The Dead Zone.

More recently, Hall has appeared in a wide variety of TV and film, with a supporting role in The Dark Knight (2007), a starring role opposite Brad Pitt in war satire War Machine (2017), and guest spots in Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Blacklist.

Paul Gleason (Vernon)

Playing the high school principal was Paul Gleason, who was at the time a recognized character actor. Gleason followed The Breakfast Club with regular guest appearances in hit TV shows such as The A-Team, Miami Vice, The Equalizer, and 21 Jump Street, largely specializing in authority, detective and cop roles. It was in this guise that he appeared in Die Hard (1988) and – less seriously – in Loaded Weapon 1 (1993). Gleason died of lung cancer aged 67 in 2006.