Emilio Estevez: ‘Brat Pack will be on my tombstone’. He's barely acted in decades while he's directed several films.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/10/emilio-estevez-brat-pack-will-be-on-my-tombstone

“That [term] will be on my tombstone,” he says, gloomily and accurately. “It’s annoying because Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon have worked together more than any of us have. We just made two movies and somehow it morphed into something else.”

Both The Breakfast Club and St Elmo’s Fire came out in 1985, and anyone who was in them was deemed to be in the Brat Pack. Unfortunately for Estevez, he starred in both and the New York magazine article that coined the term Brat Pack dubbed him “the unofficial president”.

It also made him sound like the best of the bunch, always paying for other people’s drinks and generally being everyone’s best friend. But Estevez still recoils at references to the article, three decades on, and refuses to name the journalist who wrote it (David Blum). “If that’s the one thing he has offered the world, that’s a shame,” he grumbles, still smarting at the reductive term that preserved him – along with Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Andrew McCarthy and Ally Sheedy – in teen-dream amber for ever.

Anyway, on to The Public, which Estevez directed, wrote and stars in. The film, which wears its well-intended heart on its sleeve to a fault, is almost entirely set in a public library, and it imagines what would happen if the homeless people who sit there all day for warmth refused to leave in the evening when the library shut. Estevez plays the librarian fighting for the homeless people and it stars two other 80s heartthrobs: Estevez’s close friend, Christian Slater, and Alec Baldwin.

“I hadn’t seen Alec in 30 years, and I was pretty scared of him at first. Back in the day, when he first came on the scene we thought we were done. I was part of this group of scrappers – me, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn – and when Alec Baldwin came in the room the whole industry was like, OK, this guy’s a great actor, and he’s gorgeous! So we had this absolute jealousy of Alec Baldwin. But now here we are today working together, texting all the time and having a bromance.”

I tell him that for a certain kind of person – one who insists on asking about the Brat Pack, say – the thought of Estevez and Baldwin having any kind of romance is basically erotica. He makes a hoot of a laugh and, to his great credit, concedes the inevitable: in the hearts of an entire generation, he will forever be in 1985.

The Public is the first movie Estevez has directed that doesn’t include any members of his family: the little-loved 1990 garbagemen comedy, Men at Work, starred him and Charlie; 1996’s The War at Home, 2006’s Bobby – Estevez’s best film – and 2011’s The Way all featured or starred his father. Did he miss not having them around this time?

“No,” he answers immediately, then laughs. “When you work with family, you know what buttons to push because you helped to build the machine. There were times on The Way when my dad looked at me, not as his director, but as the 12-year-old boy he remembers running around in the backyard with a movie camera. I could see it in his eyes. We had massive fights on that film.”

As anyone with a family knows, massive fights are the flip side of being so close with someone that you feel you can say anything to them, and the Estevezes are famously close knit. Martin Sheen and his wife, Janet, have been happily married for almost 60 years. When Estevez and his three siblings were growing up – as well as Charlie, there’s another brother, Ramon, and a sister Renee – the whole family would travel wherever Martin was shooting, loading up the station wagon and all six of them shipping on out.

“My parents knew that if the family was to stay together, we had to stay together,” he says. They have maintained that setup as adults: Estevez, who is not married and has two adult children, mainly lives in LA “because it’s where my parents and siblings are”. In her book, Moore says part of the reason she fell in love with Estevez was because of his relationship with his family. Every weekend, the whole group, to her amazement, would gather at the family home and debate politics, led by Martin, a liberal activist. (She is somewhat less glowing about Estevez, whom she broke up with after suspicions of infidelity. But let’s not relitigate that past.)

In other interviews, Estevez has tended to go a bit terse when asked about his family. But the subject is unavoidable as soon as he walks into the room: these days he looks so much like his dad, it is startling. This is no surprise – after all, he played his father’s character on The West Wing, President Bartlett, in flashbacks.