Emilio Estevez Feared He'd Be Fired From ‘The Breakfast Club'

Yahoo

14-04-2025

Emilio Estevez once feared that he blew it during table read for The Breakfast Club. The actor, who played high school jock Andrew Clark in the 1985 John Hughes coming-of-age film, spoke out about the film's 40th anniversary reunion at the C2E2 pop culture convention on April 12.
'The first time that we all got together, [Hughes] had organized a read-through of the script at a hotel in Century City,' Estevez, 62, recalled, per Entertainment Weekly. 'I had, the night before, just had all four wisdom teeth pulled — impacted wisdom teeth. I was on pain pills.'
Estevez explained that his agent called him and told him he had to show up for the read-through, despite the fact that he had a swollen face and was on painkillers.
The actor noted that after the table read, Hughes proudly played the first cut of his movie Sixteen Candles for The Breakfast Club cast, which included two Sixteen Candles stars—Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall—as well as Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy.
'We're sitting there, I don't think I made it through the opening credits,' Estevez revealed, adding that he didn't wake up until the very end of the movie screening.
'I passed out from the pain pills, and just from the ordeal of having my teeth extracted," he explained. "I believed [I would be fired]. I thought, 'Oh gosh, I just failed the final test.'
Estevez went on to star in The Breakfast Club, which became one of the biggest teen films of the 1980s. But years later, he did part ways with a spinoff of one of his other big movies. After starring in three films for The Mighty Ducks franchise, in 2021, he got into a dispute over the Disney+ series The Mighty Ducks Game Changers.
Deadline reported that the actor exited the franchise amid a 'contract dispute' and 'a myriad of creative differences.' Estevez was also dealing with the effects of long COVID at the time.