As the closing credits of teen comedy-drama The Breakfast Club rolled, the film’s catchy anthem played.

Simple Minds sang Don’t You (Forget About Me) and, almost 40 years on, many of us still remember the coming-of-age film about five US high school misfits stuck in detention on a Saturday. The 1985 film was a critical and box office hit and won its young stars Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy a legion of fans. But with the fame came a label the rising actors were less pleased about.

Along with the stars of 1985’s St Elmo’s Fire – Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Mare Winningham and Andrew McCarthy – they became known as the Brat Pack. A photo of Lowe, Nelson and Estevez headlined ‘Hollywood’s Brat Pack’ appeared on a 1985 cover of New York magazine.

Journalist David Blum, who coined the term, said at the time: “This is the Hollywood Brat Pack. It is to the 1980s what the Rat Pack was to the 1960s – a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl for parties, women and a good time.”

But McCarthy, now 61, said in a recent interview: “Were we brats? We hated the tag. We were now members of a club none of us wished to join. I felt that I lost control of the narrative of my career overnight.”

He has directed Brats – a documentary out on Thursday – which reunites the members of the Pack and explores the impact the label had on their careers. It is also a wonderful nostalgia-fest for film fans who get to see what happened to some of their favourite 80s stars. But not everyone loathed the nickname.

McCarthy admitted: “The young ­people of my generation loved it. Being in the Brat Pack meant I was one of the ­ultimate cool kids – the ones you wanted to hang out with, to emulate. We were the ones you admired. The Brat Pack label preceded me into every room I entered. If you were coming of age in the 80s, the Brat Pack was near the centre of your cultural awareness but from those of us experiencing it from the inside, the Brat Pack was something very different.”

One of the first actors McCarthy contacted about the Brats documentary was Lowe, 60, who, in 1988, stepped away from the limelight after a sex tape scandal. His career bounced back by the turn of the millennium after he played Sam Seaborn in political drama, The West Wing. But Lowe, who has been married to make-up artist Sheryl Berkoff since 1991, has a very different view of the nickname.

In May 2021, on his podcast Literally! with Rob Lowe, he said: “I love that the Brat Pack existed. I love being a part of it and have such fond memories.”

Lowe also co-starred in St Elmo’s Fire with Moore, 61. He has refused to elaborate on suggestions they may have been more than friends by saying: “A gentleman never kisses and tells.”

But Moore revealed in her 2019 memoir Inside Out that producers made her go into rehab before St Elmo’s Fire due to her cocaine problem. That, and the Brat Pack term, did not harm her career though. By the mid-1990s, she was highest-paid actress and still has a successful film career today. But she always hated the moniker.

Moore said: “It really irritated me. None of us really liked the idea of being called ‘brats,’ or that we weren’t professionals or didn’t take our work seriously.”

Sheedy, 61, now a theatre department professor in New York, told a book about the Brat Pack that “the article destroyed the group”. She added: “I had felt truly a part of something, and Blum blew it to pieces.”

Nelson, 64, said the suggestion that the Pack were best friends was not necessarily the case. In September 2022, he told The Jewish Chronicle: “I lived in New York at the time and I didn’t travel 3,000 miles to have a beer. I was working with those actors. That’s why I was having dinner with them.” Hall and Ringwald were 15 when they starred in Brat Pack movie Sixteen Candles. Hall, 56, later said being labelled as a Brat Packer at such a young age “was challenging” and “took some adjusting”.

He has since had a successful acting career, is a songwriter and singer with the band Hall of Mirrors and, last June, became a dad for the first time. Ringwald, 56, disliked being lumped into the Brat Pack too, saying it was “unfair” – especially as she was only 15 at the time, and still at school.

“We did a couple movies together, but I didn’t really hang out with a lot of those people, just because I was younger at the time,” she said On Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 1994. When I did Breakfast Club, I was 15, 16 years old, and they were already in their 20s. I was quite a bit younger, so when they were going out drinking and doing crazy stuff, I was going to school.”

Estevez, 62, the older brother of Charlie Sheen, hated the label so much that he “turned down” everything related to the Brat Pack and still refuses to utter Blum’s name, four decades on. Despite this, he has had a successful film career – re-releasing cult film The Way, starring his father Martin Sheen, last year. But the coming-of-age actors have most certainly grown up.

McCarthy said catching up with Estevez after nearly 30 years “felt like meeting a long-lost brother”. For the rest of us, Brats will provide a great opportunity to wander down memory lane.

Brats is out on Hulu on Thursday