Emilio Estevez wasn’t thinking clearly when he met his “The Breakfast Club” co-stars.
The stars of the 1985 film reunited for a 40th anniversary panel at the C2E2 convention in Chicago Saturday, during which Estevez, 62, revealed he was high on painkillers when the cast and late director John Hughes first got together for a read-through of the script at a hotel in Century City, Calif.
“I had, the night before, just had all four wisdom teeth pulled — impacted wisdom teeth,” Estevez recalled. “I was on pain pills, and my agent called and said, ‘Listen, they’re going to do the read-through, and you have to show up.’”
“I said, ‘Look, my face is swollen, I’m on pain pills, I’m bleeding out!’ They said, ‘No, no, no, it’s important. You have to be there,’” he shared.
Estevez, who was joined on stage at the convention by Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, and Ally Sheedy, recalled that he couldn’t drive because of his surgery, so producers had a car bring him to the hotel, where the cast did the first read-through of the film’s script.
“At the end of the read-through, John says, ‘Hey listen, I brought the first cut of my movie ‘Sixteen Candles,’ I want to show it to you,’” said Estevez. “And we said, ‘Okay great.’ He puts the film on, we’re sitting there, I don’t think I made it through the opening credits. I passed out from the pain pills and just from the ordeal of having my teeth extracted.”
“I woke up at the end credits, and I looked at Judd, and Judd says, ‘I think you’re getting fired,’” Estevez remembered.
“And I believed it too,” he added. “I thought, ‘Oh gosh, I just failed the final test.’”
“The Breakfast Club” follows five high school students who are forced to spend Saturday in detention together for different reasons. Estevez played athlete Andrew Clark.
The film, considered a cult classic, was written and directed by Hughes, who died of a heart attack in 2009 at age 59.
Saturday’s pop culture convention marked the first time in 40 years that the five stars of the film were together in public.
Last year, Andrew McCarthy — another member of the Brat Pack — released his doc, “Brats.” Hall, Nelson and Ringwald all decided to opt out of appearing in the film.
“I skipped all my high school reunions, so this was something that finally felt like I needed to do, just for myself,” said Estevez, who missed other “Breakfast Club” reunions in the past.
“But this one felt special because it’s here in Chicago where we made the film, it’s the 40th anniversary, and I just love all of them so it just made sense,” the actor added.
Estevez also called the beloved teen comedy-drama “one of those movies that stands the test of time.”
Later during the panel, the cast shut down the possibility that they would do a sequel to “The Breakfast Club.”
“I personally don’t believe in remaking that movie,” said Ringwald, 57, “because I think this movie is very much of its time.”
