The latest tome from the “Pretty in Pink” and “St. Elmo’s Fire” star is titled “Who Needs Friends.”

Why Andrew McCarthy didn’t write about the ‘lovely people’ in the Brat Pack in his new book about friendship

The latest tome from the "Pretty in Pink" and "St. Elmo's Fire" star is titled "Who Needs Friends."

By Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt is a writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2024. Her work has previously appeared on Yahoo and in American *Journalism Review* and *The Shreveport Times*.

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March 28, 2026 9:00 a.m. ET

The 'St. Elmo's Fire' cast in 1985. Credit:

Columbia/ Everett

Andrew McCarthy will forever be associated with the Brat Pack, a group of young actors who repeatedly worked alongside one another in the '80s. Yet McCarthy doesn't mention his costars in films such as *St. Elmo's Fire* or *Pretty and Pink* in his new book about friendship.

"No, I made that movie. That was a different movie," McCarthy tells ** when asked if he'd ever considered including his fellow Brat Packers in the pages of *Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America*. "They were all lovely guys and people, but I didn't know them that well back then. That was the irony of the whole thing."

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McCarthy is inextricably linked to a group that includes Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy, although he and others have wrestled with the label. In 2021, he wrote about the subject in 2021's *Brat: An '80s Story*, which he adapted into *Brats*, a 2024 documentary for Hulu.

"The irony is that I was pretty much a loner, and when you're 22 years old and all this attention, all these things happening, I just kind of withdrew, which is my normal personality, tendency, something like that," says McCarthy, who has has continued acting, but also has directed shows such as *Gossip Girl*, *Orange Is the New Black*, and *The Blacklist*.

'Who Needs Friends' is Andrew McCarthy's latest book.

John Nacion/Variety via Getty

In *Brats*, McCarthy reunited with several peers he hadn't encountered in 30 years.

"I know nothing about their day-to-day lives, but there's a certain aspect that they will know about each other, because we went through that together, that thing," McCarthy says. "And so there's a certain intimacy in a certain way of, 'Oh, I know, I know you know me like no one else,' you know what I mean? But that wasn't friendship per se."

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It also wasn't *not *friendship.

"I do like them very much, and it was a great surprise of that documentary, going back and finally discovering how much affection we all had for each other in a way we didn't when we were young," McCarthy says. "That was lovely to discover, because, you know, it's all water over the dam now. Back then, we were young and scared and competitive and all that kind of stuff. So now it was kind of funny. That was a lovely surprise and experience to really feel what affection I had for everyone. But they were never intimates of mine in that way when we were young."

What the actor did include in his book is a road trip across the country in which he visits close pals, sometimes surprising them.

Andrew McCarthy stars in 'Pretty in Pink' (1986).

Paramount Pictures/Everett

McCarthy said he learned a lesson about the subject he was writing about.

“We need to show up. The only thing I did right in this book, I think, the only thing I can sort of take credit for in anything is that I physically showed up," McCarthy said. "There was something about my showing up that showed I was reinvesting and earning my friendships back in a certain way. And they were also kind of touched like, 'Wait, you drove here?'"

He said that articulating the value of his connection with the friends he visited was vital.

"To say like, 'You are really important in my life and have been, and I'm just so glad that I came to see you,'" McCarthy said. "And in naming that friendship, it sort of deepened it."

*Who Needs Friends* is now available in bookstores.

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