Why Judd Nelson Disappeared From Hollywood

Beginning in the late 1960s and spreading into the 1970s, American cinema was revolutionized by the New Hollywood movement. At the forefront of this movement was a crew of directors from different entertainment disciplines (film, theater, or television) who spoke to the exploding youth counterculture with classics like "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Graduate," and "M*A*S*H." The world felt like it was going mad, but the movies were somehow helping us make sense of this descent. Before moviegoers could adjust to this newfangled mode of motion picture art, the film brats arrived. Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg rattled the industry's cage in wildly different ways. It was a glorious time. Then studios, with the perhaps unwitting assistance of Lucas and Spielberg, locked in on a formula: They could make hundreds of millions of dollars off a single movie if they hit the right commercial buttons. It was at this moment that the New Hollywood era died.

No filmmaker of that era thrived more brilliantly than Coppola, whose four-film run of "The Godfather," "The Conversation," "The Godfather Part II," and "Apocalypse Now" is considered by many to be an insurmountable achievement, and no one took it on the chin as viciously as he did with the near-career-killing debacle of "One From the Heart." Coppola was reeling. He needed a hit to keep the tattered dream of his company, Zoetrope Studios, alive. So acting on the advice of schoolchildren, he made an adaptation of S.E. Hinton's young adult novel "The Outsiders." In doing so, he had to populate his film with young actors who could look authentically of the mid-1960s era while also selling the wrong-side-of-the-tracks angst that made the book so popular. Casting directors Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins dug deep, and emerged with an astonishing cast of fresh faces that included C. Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, and Rob Lowe.

The moniker "Brat Pack" would not be applied to these actors until 1985, but by 1984, with sexually frank teen comedies like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" in heavy rotation on pay cable and "Sixteen Candles" hooking an entire generation on the snarky-sentimental aesthetic of John Hughes, it was clear that a new cinematic movement had arrived.

If the Brat Pack had a "The Godfather," it's "The Breakfast Club," and if it had a Marlon Brando at the time, it was Judd Nelson. He was hot, rebellious, and undeniably talented. The future was his. So why did his career fail to reach such heights, and why is he seemingly done with Hollywood?

The son of a politician father and corporate lawyer mother, Nelson has stated in interviews that self-dependence was stressed throughout his childhood: You get knocked down, you get back up, and so on. Like Brando, Nelson studied with famed acting teacher Stella Adler, and his method approach to performance caused him problems. Unlike Brando, there were no Broadway triumphs prior to stardom. He just appeared out of nowhere as a fast-talking delinquent in the uneven 1984 class satire "Making the Grade" before vaulting to stardom the following year in the twin Brat Pack ur-texts of "The Breakfast Club" and "St. Elmo's Fire."

It's wild to consider how fast this all happened. No one left "The Outsiders" and thought the multiplexes would be flooded with films starring the children chosen by Hirshenson and Jenkins (and ultimately Jackie Burch, who cast Hughes' first two directorial efforts). But here they were: Ringwald, Estevez, Hall, McCarthy, Sheedy, Lowe, Moore, and Nelson. They each checked boxes, and most of them got a chance to play against type at some point. Having come of age throughout this era, I believe Ringwald was the soul of the Brat Pack, while Nelson was the closest thing it had to a f***-you icon. His Bender in "The Breakfast Club" spoke for all of the kids Hughes rarely wrote for: poor, abused, pissed off. So why did Nelson never matter as much, culturally speaking, again?

It's bizarre how quickly most of the Brat Pack flamed out. Though most of them were legitimately talented performers, they were treated as a fad that was good for the garbage once 1987 rolled around. When Hughes left high school behind after "Some Kind of Wonderful," which he only wrote, the Brat Pack floundered. To give you a sense of how quickly that movement flamed out, Rob Lowe's appearance in 1991's "Wayne's World" was considered an out-of-nowhere comeback.

How did Nelson fare once the Brat Pack hype died down? He starred alongside Pack-mate Ally Sheedy in an adaptation of crime fiction maestro Ross Macdonald's "Blue City" in 1986, which you might be tempted to watch because it was co-written by the great Walter Hill. Alas, it's undone by cloddish direction from "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club" producer Michelle Manning (who might've been the victim of studio interference). Nelson followed this up with his portrayal of a brash young lawyer in Bob Clark's uneven "From the Hip." The material has promise and Nelson's up to the task, but Clark and then unknown screenwriter David E. Kelley strand their star with a limp script.

In 1989, Nelson delved deep into the darkness as a serial killer in B-movie legend William Lustig's "Relentless." Nelson treats the film as his attempt to go haywire in a shockingly believable fashion akin to what Robert De Niro did when he played Travis Bickle, but Lustig is trying to make a respectable movie, and that's simply not his forte. Had "Relentless" been made in the key of "Maniac Cop," Nelson might've given a cult breakthrough performance. That day would come, but, alas, it would arrive at the cusp of his career downturn.

Nelson kicked off 1991 with the kind of role that should've been his bread-and-butter throughout the decade. He's just positively aces as a stylish, s***-talking NYPD detective in "New Jack City," but for whatever reason, he didn't pursue this path. If you're asking Nelson, he gave one of his best performances later that year in Adam Rifkin's absurd black comedy "The Dark Backward," in which he plays the world's worst stand-up comic. This film is a love-it-or-hate-it vision of rock bottom that will either have you howling or clicking over to something less deranged. I'm not a fan, but I do admire Nelson's commitment to playing such a horribly sweaty loser. There were variations he could've played here.

That must-watch charge Nelson used to have suddenly went dead with a string of direct-to-video movies and supporting turns in dreck like the Shaquille O'Neal vehicle "Steel." The filmography isn't bare; he worked steadily into the 2020s, but the frequency and quality has tailed off. What are we to make of this?

Nelson recently starred in a Wilmington, North Carolina production of A.R. Gurney's oft-performed drama "Love Letters," and was asked to reflect on the film that switched his career into overdrive. If Molly Ringwald, his onscreen love interest in "The Breakfast Club," is uncomfortable with the film now, how can he defend it? As he told the Wilmington Star News:

"I think it's really a product of its time. When we were making it, we were aware that Hughes was a talent. To this day, in his shadow we all remain. I'm sorry for his passing because I'd always hoped we'd get to work together again sometime."

Basically, Nelson isn't as troubled by the film in 2024 because it's a film about kids in 1985. Bender is a boor with a heart of gold, and Claire is a rich girl who needs a little mess in her life to tick off her parents. And maybe this is what chilled his career. He was a rebel with a cause for '80s kids, but his brand of troublemaking — particularly his nonstop objectification of Claire — is a cause that would get him canceled in 2024.

So maybe the fact that Nelson's signature character would be persona non grata in today's Hollywood has made him a pariah by association. He didn't leave Hollywood; Hollywood left him.

Nelson seems to be in good health, and appeared in a remake of "The Most Dangerous Game" alongside Tom Berenger and Bruce Dern two years ago, so a comeback doesn't seem like too heavy of a lift. He just needs one of the brats who grew up on the Brat Pack to do him a solid. Who are these filmmakers? Edgar Wright, Rian Johnson, and Richard Kelly spring instantly to mind, but that's barely scratching the surface of Gen X filmmakers who watched "The Breakfast Club" in the 1980s and beyond.

In that interview with the Wilmington Star News, Nelson said, "Any time an actor gets good material, I feel compelled to say yes. Great pieces are few and far between." Brats of the world unite. It's time to give Nelson another warm day in the sun after too many years of slugging it out in movies that squandered his Stella Adler-trained talent. He might not be answering Andrew McCarthy's phone calls (for on-camera use, at least, if the Brat Pack member's documentary "Brats" is to be believed), but I bet he'd hop on the horn if Quentin Tarantino rang. Let's make this happen!