‘Very Emotional and Moved to Have Us All Together’

The Breakfast Club main cast reunited for the first time in 40 years at a C2E2 panel in Chicago on April 12
The reunion included Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall
“I feel very emotional and moved to have us all together,” Ringwald said during the panel with her former costars

The cast of The Breakfast Club is back together — 40 years after that fateful detention day.

Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall and Emilio Estevez reunited on April 12 during a panel at C2E2, a pop culture convention in Chicago, to reminisce with fans over John Hughes’s 1985 coming-of-age film. The panel was moderated by Josh Horowitz.

“I feel very emotional and moved to have us all together,” said Ringwald, who played the film’s iconic high school “princess” Claire Standish.

Ringwald, 57, also noted that the convention marked the first time Estevez, 62, has joined them, joking that “We don’t have to use the cardboard cutout anymore. I feel really moved that we’re all together.”

Addressing his past absence, Estevez, who played athlete Andrew Clark, explained, “I felt that I needed to do it for myself.”

The actor also explained that the reunion felt “special” given the location of the convention as the movie was famously shot at a high school in the Chicago suburbs.

Elsewhere in the panel, Hall, 56, and Ringwald revealed whether they had to audition for their roles in the classic movie after having starred in Hughes’s Sixteen Candles the year prior.

“John just called up and said, ‘I want you to come in.’ He didn’t have a script. He didn’t give me a script,” Hall, who played brainiac Brian Johnson, said. The actor added that Hughes was just asking him questions, such as, “What do you think about this? What do you think about that?”

Ringwald, however, had a different experience with the legendary filmmaker. “Originally, he was gonna do The Breakfast Club before he did Sixteen Candles,” she said of Hughes. “And then he wrote Sixteen Candles … and turned it into the studio and they said, ‘Oh, we wanna do that one first.’ “

She continued, “So they put The Breakfast Club on hold and then, from my understanding, John Cusack was gonna play Bender and Joan Cusack was going to play Allison, I don’t know who was gonna play the other parts. And then after Sixteen Candles, he gave me the script.”

It wasn’t too long ago that part of the cast including Ringwald, Sheedy, Nelson and Hall met up. In fact, they recently were featured in another panel discussion at MegaCon Orlando on Feb. 7.

During that panel, Ringwald said the appeal of the movie for her was that she got to enjoy a different high school experience from her own.

“Whenever I got to do a movie I got to leave my school and that was amazing,” the actress said. However, the part didn’t totally get her out of school: Ringwald and Hall attended classes on set, she said during the panel. “We’d go do a scene in the library and then study algebra with our studio teacher. But it was fun.”

Sheedy, who played Allison Reynolds, the “basket case” in the movie, reminisced on how close the cast became during the filming.

“I was really happy when we were making this movie, we all really … I don’t know if you can tell but we all really do love each other. It was a dream,” Sheedy said. “A joyful experience.”

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They all had their own ideas of where the future could have taken their characters following high school graduation too.

“I think Bender is clearly the principal of the school,” Nelson, 65, said, receiving laughter from the crowd when referencing his rebellious character, John Bender.

“I think Allison would’ve ended up being a writer, maybe a professor, something intellectual,” Sheedy mused.

Ringwald on the other hand, thought Claire would have taken her own, more experimental path.

“I think that Claire probably got married a few times,” Ringwald said to the crowd. “And maybe decided she liked women. You know, her kids are grown up, she’s like, ‘Okay I’ll try that.’ It didn’t work out so well with the guys.”

However, despite fans’ hopes for a sequel, the group said another film was not in the foreseeable future for them out of respect for the late Hughes, who directed the classic and several other films of that time.

“It was something that was conjured and thought about,” Hall shared, referencing one of his last conversations with the film’s director. And while he and his costars were enthused on the idea, they agreed they wouldn’t do it without Hughes at the helm.

Ringwald opened up about her relationship with Hughes during an interview with U.K. outlet The Times in April 2024.

“They were all really fun movies to make,” she told The Times. “Sixteen Candles, the first movie I made with the director John Hughes, in 1984, was filmed during the summer. He would just let the camera roll and we would improvise. It was a very free, creative experience.”

In 2015, Ringwald told PEOPLE that making The Breakfast Club was “a great experience,” adding, “I was really loving the work that I was doing.”

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