For many of us who came of age in the ’80s, Andrew McCarthy seemed just like the characters that he played who seemed to have it all figured out.
In his seminal roles as Blaine in “Pretty in Pink” and as Clay in “Less Than Zero,” he was handsome, rich, smart, courageous and sensitive. And for those of us who felt more like Jon Cryer’s character, “Duckie,” than Blaine, we couldn’t help but admire him.
So, as we celebrate the 30-year anniversary of “Pretty In Pink,” it was with great anticipation that I spoke with McCarthy to glean his insights about the world, because, since his early days as a teenage heartthrob, McCarthy has done quite a few things.
He has overcome alcoholism, become a father, written a best-selling novel, become a travel writer and directed shows like “Orange is the New Black” and “The Blacklist.” And just as his character did in “St. Elmo’s Fire,” I asked when we met, “What’s the meaning of life?” And wouldn’t you know it, he had an answer: Making yourself uncomfortable is the key to finding out who you are.
Being uncomfortable was unfortunately something McCarthy had to face early on. He considers himself an introvert. And introverts, generally, are people who find that social interactions tend to drain them of energy, in contrast to extroverts who tend to derive energy from being around others.
“I’m an introverted person, so I’m very comfortable being alone and I’ve always been comfortable being alone,” he told me. “I find that people go to great lengths to avoid being alone and they get themselves into a lot of trouble. I find that a lot of unhappiness is from trying not to be alone.”
While, in theory, introversion is simply a personality style, sometimes there is a stigma, as though being shy or withdrawn is unhealthy. As a result, there’s often pressure for introverts to change. “I found in my experience, being an introvert is something you’re supposed to get over. But why?” McCarthy said, “My wife is wildly an extroverted person … . She’s energized by a big party. I am totally depleted by a big party. I’m energized by being alone. I always say to my wife, ‘I need to have me, then I can have us.’ She says, ‘I need to have us, and then I can go have me.’”
McCarthy credits his acceptance of being introverted in part to the book “Quiet.” He explained, “It took me a long time to not feel the need to apologize for being an introverted person. It was a huge relief when I got that book — at a certain point, just accepting yourself. This is the way I am, and it’s a normal thing.”
In light of his introversion, it may seem paradoxical to some that McCarthy chose acting as a career. But McCarthy makes a distinction between “acting” and “performing.”
“I’m certainly in no way a performer,” he explained. “I don’t relish that. There are people who love performing and people looking at them.”
But for McCarthy, acting was a healthy way of feeling uncomfortable — of pushing himself so he could explore different emotions. “It was the thing I found that made me feel like myself. Finding an inner truth, I suppose. I love the alchemy of bringing things up from inside of you and the alchemy of then creating a character through different things, personal things, in my life. But that’s not in any way performing. It’s the opposite of performing,” he said.
For McCarthy, part of his process was allowing himself to feel uncomfortable, an approach he learned from fellow actor John Cleese. “Luckily, being in a field that is ‘creative’ is all about process and trusting process and feeling uncomfortable. John Cleese, the great comedian from Monty Python – I saw this interview of him once where he said, ‘Other guys from Monty Python were much funnier than me, but I was more comfortable in the uncomfortability of the process than many of them. And I didn’t grab the first quick answer. I allowed myself to get uncomfortable for longer than many of the others. And so my stuff was often the funniest.’ I thought that was genius and that really stayed with me.”
McCarthy’s success didn’t mesh well with his introverted style. “I was totally unprepared for any kind of success when I was a young person. I didn’t know anyone who was successful in that way in show business, or famous,” he explained. “I also temperamentally wasn’t particularly suited for it. Attention made me recoil.”
As he rose to stardom, McCarthy also struggled with alcoholism for many years. When people would ask if he drank because of his success, McCarthy said that he would answer with, “No, success allows me to buy better vodka.” He went on to explain that while “drinking certainly gave me something to hide behind…A man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, the drink takes the man… I don’t think my drinking had anything to do with my acting or my success.” And McCarthy stopped drinking about 25 years ago.
As time went on, McCarthy became less compelled by the acting roles he was offered. “For years, I wasn’t getting to do what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a plan for the next step along the way.”
Eventually, McCarthy found traveling — and his world opened up. “There’s this whole thing about traveling alone. Huge — it can change everyone’s life to travel alone.”
McCarthy explained how his journey began. “I have a travel-writer friend named Don George, who says there’s one trip that changes every traveler’s life. … The trip that changed my life was when I walked across Spain … . It just changed the way I placed myself in the world.”
“I hated the trip, I hated to hike and I hated the walking until I had sort of a breakdown…feeling weak from walking day after day after day, about two weeks into the trip. One moment, I’m on my knees sobbing; I didn’t understand why and then everything changed for me. It was just one of those breaking release moments,” McCarthy said.
“When I found that moment, traveling, I had this revelation: I see something coming from the horizon that’s coming toward me and it was really this feeling welling up inside me, and suddenly, I’m without fear at this moment. Right between my shoulder blades, where I’ve always carried it, I just feel wide open and very vulnerable and expansive, and there’s room for me. That was something that happened to me through walking.”
What McCarthy is describing could be considered “awe.” Awe has been described as an overwhelming feeling of wonder with a tinge of fear. Initial research suggests that awe induces individuals to process information differently, and think in a “deeper” way.
McCarthy’s deeper understanding was the discovery that he had previously been overwhelmed by fear. “The next day, I woke up and felt like I was forgetting something, missing something. It occurred to me, as I was walking, what I was missing, what I didn’t have was the thing that I always had carried with me every day of my life…and the moment of its first absence is when I became aware of it – it was fear,” he explained.
For McCarthy, his experience of awe translated into not just an awareness of, but also a reduction in, fear. “I was so afraid in life, and I carried so much fear with me wherever I went. Fear dominated my life and made so many of my decisions for me without me knowing it was making the decisions. It’s just by circumstance, by sheer wearing me down physically, baking in the hot sun, and when I was released from that for a few months, I felt like myself in a way that I had only experienced one other time, and that’s when I first acted. The first moment I acted, I had the exact same experience,” he said.
“The feeling, like, ‘Oh, here I am.’”
And McCarthy decided he enjoyed being unafraid. “I just made up my mind … . If I’m going to be afraid of everything all the time, then OK, fine, but it’s not going to stop me. I’m terrified of flying, I have an irrational fear of flying, but I fly all the time, because I’m not going to let my fear stop me from doing that.”
Soon, McCarthy not only explored traveling, but also travel writing. And he found a whole new career. While he felt less in control of his career while acting, McCarthy felt better prepared to take command of his career in travel writing. As a result, he experienced all of the passion and creativity of acting without the loss of control.
“When I became a travel writer, I handled it differently,” he explained. “I had great passion for travel, but when I decided to write about travel … I decided not to lead with ‘Oh, the guy from “Pretty in Pink” wants to be a travel writer’… . So, I agented myself the way I would have wanted to be agented when I was young and didn’t know enough. I gained credibility so that by the time I’m outed, it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, look at this, isn’t this interesting?’”
“Instead of, ‘That guy from “Pretty in Pink” thinks he’s a writer. Great.’”
McCarthy saw parallels with his acting and travel writing. “People say, ‘How does an actor become a travel writer? That’s interesting. They are so different.’ But they are exactly the same to me. They manifest in the same way in that they’re both storytelling, and that’s how I communicate. They’re both some expression of creativity.”
McCarthy realized that he handled his travel-writing career in a better way. “They were handled very differently and yet the impulse was the same in both of them —again, that feeling that I’m feeling like me, I’m the best version of me when I’m doing this,” he said. “My hands are on the wheel certainly much more when I began travel writing. Before, there were no hands on the wheel. I wasn’t desperate… . I was taking back my power.”
McCarthy feels grateful for the opportunity to be creative and to push himself into what he called “uncomfortable” places.
“Travel writing gave me huge creative rebirth when I was 40 that I’d lost in acting. I wasn’t getting particularly interesting projects. So, it was a huge creative rebirth for me that I was really grateful for,” he said.
“I’m lucky in that I get to perform creativity every day of my life. I don’t know how people who don’t have that in their life function. That’s how I locate myself. I have to try and create something every day whether it’s good or not,” he said. “I hope it’s good, but if it’s not, it doesn’t really matter as long as I’m doing that. I just meander from one career back to the other and slide over to do acting. It’s all different manifestations of the same search for inner satisfaction.”
And McCarthy finds himself somewhat carefree to take risks creatively and professionally — to be uncomfortable. He explained, “Now I just don’t care anymore. For years, I tried to fight that and tried to prove this and prove that. You can’t convince people of anything. The minute I stopped fighting it, it starts to dissolve and disappears and that thing you tried to fight against becomes an asset.”
This included getting over the “Brat Pack” label that afflicted him and many of his colleagues in the late ’80s. “I worked for years to push against ‘Pretty in Pink’ and the ‘Brat Pack.’ It’s there; it’ll always be there. It’ll be in my obituary: Andrew ‘Brat Packer’ ‘Pretty in Pink’ McCarthy,” he said. “Now I love it. I touched a generation of people in a way. And now a second generation,” he explained.
“When I stopped fighting it and just turn around and embrace it, it loses all its power and then only the good stuff stays. But it also takes years. And it also takes going away from it and doing other things so that it doesn’t matter anymore. I know it was me doing all those things 30 years ago.”
“But it seems like a different person.”
Part of what allows McCarthy to take creative risks without fear is knowing that even failures are integral to eventual success. “Nothing’s wasted in that way. I just wrote a novel. I’ve been working on this novel for six or maybe seven years and I was the only one who though it was any good,” he explained. “And then one day, I was sitting on a plane and thought of it from an entirely different character’s perspective. Then I started rewriting this same story from that different character’s perspective. I rewrote the entire novel in six months, sold the novel and the novel will now have its life.”
“Ninety-five percent of what I wrote over the seven years is not in this novel, but it fueled everything that I did write in six months. Nothing is wasted, all those 30, 40 drafts of that novel that sat in my drawer, will never see the light of day, except they will, because they fed this other thing.”
“I am 53, for fuck’s sake. At a certain point, we hope we trust our process. That really takes trust and that really takes experience and time to do that.”
McCarthy feels comfortable knowing that while he may be uncomfortable waiting for the next project, it will happen eventually. “Boredom doesn’t exist. I don’t know what boredom is. It’s just a suppression of energy and/or a finishing of one thing and a waiting for the next thing to arrive. ‘I’m bored, I’m bored.’ Good. Be bored.”
“Something will arrive. It always does.”
