Actor Anthony Michael Hall revealed that the late director John Hughes spent part of their final phone call pitching a sequel to "The Breakfast Club", a film whose original cast recently said they would never revisit without him.
Hall, now 58, shared the story during a Wednesday appearance on "The Rich Eisen Show." He said Hughes called him around 1988 with comedian John Candy already on the line, and the three talked for a couple of hours. During the conversation, Hughes laid out a concept for a sequel that would reunite the five original characters as 30-year-olds navigating the workforce.
Page Six reported Hall's account of the call, which he described as the last time he spoke with the director. Hughes died in August 2009 at age 59 after suffering a fatal heart attack while walking on West 55th Street in New York City. The sequel never materialized, and Hall said he does not know whether Hughes ever put the idea on paper.
Hall's anecdote about the sequel was not the only window he offered into Hughes's restless creative output. He recalled that during the production of "The Breakfast Club" itself, roughly two weeks into shooting, Hughes pulled him aside with a new concept.
Hall recounted the exchange on air:
"Even when we were doing 'Breakfast Club,' he came to me about a couple weeks in. He goes, 'I just came up with another idea for our next film.' He goes, 'It's going to be you and this other kid. You're going to create a girl in the computer.' I'm like, 'What?'"
That idea became "Weird Science," which hit theaters the same year as "The Breakfast Club" in 1985 and starred Hall alongside Ilan Mitchell-Smith, Kelly LeBrock, Bill Paxton, and Robert Downey Jr. Hall said Hughes wrote an entire act of that script after wrapping a night of shooting on "Breakfast Club."
"He was just incredibly prolific," Hall said.
Hughes's output during the mid-1980s remains one of the most concentrated runs in American comedy filmmaking. Beyond "The Breakfast Club" and "Weird Science," his credits from that era include "Sixteen Candles," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," "Pretty in Pink," and "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." His final film as director was 1991's "Curly Sue." "The Breakfast Club," co-produced with Ned Tanen, grossed more than $51 million.
Hall is not the only cast member to suggest Hughes may have explored a follow-up. Molly Ringwald, who played Claire Standish in the original film, told the Daily Beast in 2015 that "somebody told" her a sequel script existed. She did not identify who.
"One day, all that stuff will come out."
Ringwald, also 58, offered no further details at the time, and no script has surfaced publicly. Whether Hughes left behind written material related to a sequel remains an open question.
Hall's disclosure carries added weight because the original "Breakfast Club" cast gathered publicly for the first time since 1985 earlier this year. All five leads, Hall, Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, and Ally Sheedy, appeared together at the C2E2 convention in Chicago to mark the film's 40th anniversary. The New York Post reported that Estevez had never previously joined a cast reunion.
At that event, the cast unanimously agreed they would not do a sequel, out of respect for Hughes.
Ringwald described the reunion in personal terms.
"I feel really very emotional and moved to have us all together."
Estevez drew a distinction between Hughes's approach and the way Hollywood works now. "Movies today are concept-driven, they're not character-driven, and the beauty of John is that he focused on characters first," he said at C2E2.
That observation gets at something worth noting. Hughes built a career on writing teenagers and young adults as full human beings, flawed, funny, anxious, and real. The idea that he was already thinking about where those characters would be at 30, just three years after the original film, fits the pattern Hall described: a writer who could not stop generating stories about the people he created.
Hall himself has stayed in the industry far longer than many child actors manage. He has been working in Hollywood for 51 years and recently joined the cast of FOX's celebrity competition series "Nation's Dumbest," hosted by Jack Whitehall. The show premiered on July 15 and features a roster that includes Ice-T, Jon Heder, Carmen Electra, Steve-O, JoJo Siwa, and Andrew Yang.
In a separate interview, Hall told Fox News that longevity in the business comes down to basics.
"Having a thick skin, and just being game and just wanting to work with the best people you can. Just being persistent and tenacious."
"Stay humble, stay focused, keep your eyes on the road, and just keep moving ahead somehow," he added. "There's no guarantees of anything in this business."
It is a grounded answer from a man who was a teenager when Hughes handed him two career-defining roles in a single year. And it is a reminder that the people who made those films were not playing characters, they were building them alongside a director who treated a Saturday detention hall like the most important room in America.
Hughes never got to make his sequel. His cast says they will not make it without him. That tells you everything about the man and the work.
