Andrew McCarthy Explains Why Molly Ringwald Wasn’t In ‘Brats’ Documentary

Andrew McCarthy had a brief conversation with Molly Ringwald regarding her involvement in his Brats documentary — but she ultimately decided not to appear in the film.

Spoilers for Brats ahead.

“She said she’d think about it and that was really the end of It,” McCarthy, 60, told Us Weekly exclusively while promoting his upcoming film. The McCarthy-directed Brats is a look back at the Brat Pack with some of the biggest stars from the 1980s — who actually hated the moniker.

The Brat Pack name came from a New York Magazine interview written by David Blum in 1985. Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Jon Cryer, Demi Moore and Rob Lowe all spoke to McCarthy in Brats about how being associated with the title impacted their careers.

“We felt sort of, in a weird way, very alone in this thing because we interpreted it as one thing and the whole rest of the public interpreted it entirely differently,” McCarthy explained to Us. “That’s all any of us ever want in life is to be seen, and we suddenly felt unseen in a certain way.”

While Ringwald, 56, “has a lot to say already in the movie” via archived footage, McCarthy admitted it “would’ve been great” to speak with her.

“She’s so articulate and insightful about these things,” he explained. “The Brat Pack’s a funny thing. It’s like an octopus — it has these long tentacles you still reach out and you can either feel them as an embrace or as something [else]. People are at different places in their lives.”

McCarthy admittedly “wanted to talk to 50 more people” about their experiences in the Brat Pack but “time” and “money” held him back.

The opening scene in Brats showed McCarthy cold-calling a lot of his former costars.

“My number’s not blocked, so there’s this random number [that] comes up and it’s like, ‘I’m not answering that phone.’ Nobody answers their phone anymore because nobody calls anybody anymore,” McCarthy said, discussing his attempts to track down former Brat Pack members. “That was an interesting thing, because I wanted everything to be filmed.”

McCarthy’s main point of the movie was transparency.

“I’m filming you talking to me about the Brat Pack in your kitchen. That’s what’s happening, we’re not trying to make it something else,” he said. “That was one of the devices I thought was important for the movie — to just sort of be transparent.”

Aside from Ringwald, Judd Nelson was also missing from Brats — despite McCarthy’s various attempts to get in touch with the actor on camera.

“Judd [is], I think, in an undisclosed location,” he quipped to Us. “But we did speak.”