Judd Nelson was the original bad boy lusted over by every teenage girl in the 80s.
Still perhaps best known for his roles in two major films of 1985 —as John Bender in John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club and Alec Newbury in Joel Schumacher’s St Elmo’s Fire — Nelson and his co-stars including Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall, known collectively as the Brat Pack came to symbolise a whole new Hollywood era with their relatable acting style and jokey antics on and off screen.
Yet despite all the tales of adoring fans and never-ending parties, Nelson’s keen to demystify such stories when we speak on Zoom. “If someone writes an article on a group of people that are working together on a movie,” he tells me, from his home in LA, “they draw the conclusion that they are the best of friends and that they hang out all the time. That’s not true, 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.”
Nelson currently stars in Iceland Is Best, a small-budget whimsical coming-of-age drama from director Max Newsom. He plays Mr Sonquist, a poetry teacher who inspires his student Sigga (Kristín Auður Sophusdóttir) to find her talent for writing. What does he feel is his character’s function in the film? “Because Sigga — the film’s young teenage heroine — is an inexperienced poet and needs some guidance, the story is seeking some kind of poetic instructor. It’s kind of nice that he is essential to her development. I really liked the fact that his real job, how he pays his bills, is working at the airport, but his love is to teach poetry. He really believes everyone has poetry inside them and I believe that is true also. I believe that we’re all born with grace. We’re lucky to still have any by the time we depart, but we are all born with grace.”
Nelson was born in Portland, Maine, to a conservative Jewish family; his father was the first Jewish president of the Portland Symphony Orchestra, and his mother a former member of the Maine House of Representatives. He was barmitzvahed, but his family didn’t really keep kosher at home; “Being from Maine if we did, no lobster,” he jokes.
But it wasn’t until after he left home that he started to pay attention to his own Jewish identity. “I didn’t really think that much about my Jewishness until I went away to prep school in New Hampshire at an Episcopal school and we had to go to chapel four mornings a week. It wasn’t super religious, so I didn’t think about it that much until I was forced to realise my differences. And then I didn’t really encounter any antisemitism until that school. I had a roommate who was really quite insane, and it wasn’t until those experiences that I learned about antisemitism, and it made me more proud to be Jewish than angry. It was like being Jewish became a good thing because idiots were attacking me for it.”
Having experienced considerable media attention in his younger years, especially as someone who was regarded as the epitome of teenage angst in the 80s, can he now relate to today’s pressures facing young actors such as the cast of Iceland Is Best? “I feel fortunate that I was spared the cellphone obsession,” he says, “and I think actors in their 20s are just rife with all this stuff now. I mean, is there really any privacy, anywhere? The laws are changing, the technology is changing, and the environment we live in is changing. When I was a kid, there was a TV show called All in the Family [based on the controversial British sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part], but there’s no way that show is getting on the air now. So, we’ve gone backwards in terms of social acceptance of people unlike us, we’re looking for what divides us not of what brings us together. That kind of internal assault on the general community will doom us. There’s no way to fight our greed if we don’t accept those people different from us as part of our community.”
Unlike most young actors nowadays, Nelson and his peers grew up and saw their first success before the dawn of social media. In a world where an actor’s worth is, more often than not, measured by how many followers they have on Instagram, Nelson is adamant that the internet is still in its infancy and that it will eventually settle. “This may be the settling. You know when you cook something in the oven and then take it out and it cools to ‘done’, you just leave it alone for 15 minutes and it’s still cooking but at a different rate. I think we may be having a ‘cool to done’ moment. I think it will take another generation, and everyone will be savvy with computers.”
When it comes to his own dealings with social media, Nelson admits to not having the time for it. I ask him if he feels like the mystique of fame has somehow been broken. “There was always that question of TV versus film. If you were a TV actor people are watching you in their pyjamas and brushing their teeth — it’s more informal. But the film actor was kind of separate and special and therefore on a pedestal. But that delineation doesn’t really exist anymore — film and television are almost the same now. When everyone is filming everybody all the time… I’m not interested in seeing photographs of what somebody is eating for dinner. I’m just not. I mean that’s great that they like their dinner, but I’m not going to post pictures of what I’m eating!”
What would Judd Nelson — an avid writer as well as an actor — like to be working on? “I like to be busy rather than idle. I tend to have a lot of energy, it’s good to have a direction to be aiming towards.”
Iceland is Best is on general release from this week
