Jon Cryer starred in the iconic romcom Pretty in Pinkalongside Molly Ringwald in 1986. Cryer played Duckie, who had a rivalry with Blane McDonough, played by Andrew McCarthy. However, Cryer revealed that the tension wasn’t only on screen. The two didn’t get along in real life, either.
In an interview with Page Six, Cryer said, “I thought he was aloof and just a d–k. We had all kinds of issues.”
Cryer recalled one specific moment when he was trying to film a close-up and Ringwald and McCarthy were goofing around on the set. “I got really mad at them,” he said. “I found out that the director asked them to do that because he wanted me really mad for the scene. But at the time, I didn’t know.”
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However, looking back, Cryer realized that McCarthy was struggling more than he realized when they were filming the hit movie. “I didn’t know that he was going through; he was battling his own demons and had a fractured family relationship with his dad. And he was already starting to have issues with alcohol,” he said. “None of this I knew about at the time, so of course he was aloof. He was just trying to keep it together on a really big job.”
Cryer shared a similar sentiment during an interview with PEOPLEin 2024. “Molly and I were work friends,” he said. “Andrew and I couldn’t even manage that. I had no idea he was already dealing with an alcohol addiction. At the time, I perceived him as kind of haughty and remote, but had I known he was working so hard just to keep it together, I might have been more understanding.”
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McCarthy wasn’t a fan of Cryer, either. In his 2021 memoir, Brat: An ’80s Story, he revealed that he disliked the actor because he had “a nervous laugh I found irritating.”
Luckily, Cryer revealed that the pair are on good terms today. “Andrew and I have had a lot of communication in the last couple of years,” he revealed.