Ally Sheedy Says The Breakfast Club’s Plot Made Her Uncomfortable
Ally Sheedy discussed The Breakfast Club recently and said that part of the plot made her uncomfortable at the time of filming
The Breakfast Club is widely considered one of the best coming-of-age movies ever, combining iconic performances with a general gestalt that is relatable to teenagers even today. The overall angst mixed with the laughs has it holding up even all these decades later. But one member of the cast said that getting into character and the makeover that went with the part made her uncomfortable. Ally Sheedy opened up a bit recently with Page Six to discuss the film and what it meant to transform herself some for the part.
During the talk, Ally Sheedy discussed her The Breakfast Club character Allison Reynolds or “The Basket Case”. In the movie, Allison is a glum and dour character, keeping to herself and exhibiting more than a bit of odd behavior. But near the end of the film, as the characters are culminating their time in library detention, Allison gets a makeover that turns her into a brighter and sunnier version. It was this part that Sheedy said made her feel a bit odd. She told Page Six (via The Mix), “[I] was uncomfortable [with] even when we were filming it…It was one of those things, though. It was the ’80s, and we got to take this young woman who seems like a crazy person and make her into, you know, somebody pretty or whatever it was. But I agree Allison is much more delicious before the hair bow goes on.”
It’s not all that surprising to hear Ally Sheedy let on about this transformation in The Breakfast Club. After all, the Allison character we meet at the beginning of the movie is one of the more interesting characters of the time. Clearly troubled, but also oddly worldly in her understanding of the social and societal mechanics, the character offers almost the perfect juxtaposition of every other character there who fit into pretty clearly defined roles. Heck, they are even named The Athlete, The Princess, The Criminal, and The Brain. The way they culminated things with her, essentially dating the jock, works for the process of the story, though could be considered out of place.
And even though Ally Sheedy let on that she saw the character transformation as something like an odd pivot, there’s no denying that The Breakfast Club’s true legacy is that it did a masterful job of distilling down the teenage experience to a couple of hours of detention in a high school library. The cast of Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwold, Anthony Michael Hall, and Judd Nelson each offered up borderline iconic performances in their parts, as recognizable today as they were back then. There’s a reason the John Hughes film is still considered one of the 80s best movies and among the best movies ever made.
And though Ally Sheedy and company never won any major awards for the film, it was considered a massive box office success as well, earning more than $50 million dollars on a paltry $1 million dollar budget. For 80s movies fitting into a particular niche, this was nothing short of a massive hit. It makes sense considering the laughs still hold up today.
Ally Sheedy was talking The Breakfast Club details while promoting her current series Single Drunk Female on Freeform. She plays the mother of the main character, Samantha (Sofia Black -D’elia) who has returned to live at home after hitting rock bottom with her drinking issues. It’s been a critical hit, currently sitting at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
