Unlike his father and his brother, Emilio Estevez never changed his name. Ramon Estevez became Martin Sheen and Carlos Estevez is better known as Charlie Sheen, but Emilio never cashed in his Latino heritage for mass market (read: white) appeal, even when he was a young ambitious teenager and being known as his father’s son would have only helped his career.
“My decision was met with a lot of resistance at the time,” Estevez tells me. “But it was abundantly clear to me that my father had earned his name and I hadn’t.”
We are sitting in a private members’ club in central London, and although he is unfailingly polite, he doesn’t look entirely comfortable. “I don’t generally hang out in places like this,” he says. Despite being a member of one of Hollywood’s most famous dynasties, the Estevez men have never been known for glitziness; when Martin Sheen appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2011, he said that he only plays golf on public courses, rather than the many private courses in LA where actors of his stature are generally found.
“I’m not comfortable belonging to a private members’ club,” Sheen said. “It has a sense of privilege and entitlement that I resent deeply.”
There is a similar seriousness to Estevez, a kind of moral rectitude, as he sits soldier-straight in his seat. In her recently published memoir, Demi Moore, who was briefly engaged to Estevez in the 1980s, says that, when they were both still in their 20s, he made her quit smoking, and I can believe it: he has the mien of a man who is baffled by anyone who wastes their time on anything frivolous.
Unfortunately for him, I have a question that I know he will find just that, and it is one that he has had to answer pretty much every day of his life for the past three decades. Because it turned out that keeping his name did not hinder Estevez’s career – if anything, he was too successful for his own good. Can I ask just one thing about the Brat Pack?
“Mmm,” he sighs, defeated, as he has been for the past four decades.
Doesn’t he think in St Elmo’s Fire that his character – who is portrayed as a big romantic for tracking Andie MacDowell down and forcibly kissing her – was a terrible stalker?
“Yes, absolutely,” he says earnestly. “If they were to remake that movie now they would never include that character. That film … I know people hold it as a fond memory, but it’s not a great film.”
Oh, Emilio!
“It’s not.”
Well, I love it.
“Really? But it’s so overdramatic!”
But that’s what young people are like. Same with The Breakfast Club – the intensity of the characters’ feelings reflects what it feels like to be young, I say.
“I would agree with you about The Breakfast Club. I think the [school] setting allowed for us to give those kinds of performances, and John [Hughes, The Breakfast Club’s director] allowed the time for us to get under the skin of those characters, and as a result it’s a superior film,” he says, ranking the two movies for which he will always be best known.
Thinking I have found an acceptably serious way to discuss the Brat Pack, I ask if he read Molly Ringwald’s essay in the New Yorker about her mixed feelings about The Breakfast Club.
“I did not, no. I wish everyone well and anyone who writes anything, whether it’s this or a New Yorker piece or Demi’s new book. But as for retrospectives, I tend not to go there. I don’t relitigate my past,” he says politely but pointedly.
Poor Emilio. He is 57 – and a grandfather! – and he has flown all the way from LA to discuss his latest very serious directing effort, The Public. Yet people won’t stop relitigating his past. Depending on the age of the journalist, he gets asked about his late-80s and 90s hits (Young Guns, The Mighty Ducks), his famous family, or – the worst, from his perspective – the Brat Pack.
“That [term] will be on my tombstone,” he says, gloomily and accurately. “It’s annoying because Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon have worked together more than any of us have. We just made two movies and somehow it morphed into something else.”
Both The Breakfast Club and St Elmo’s Fire came out in 1985, and anyone who was in them was deemed to be in the Brat Pack. Unfortunately for Estevez, he starred in both and the New York magazine article that coined the term Brat Pack dubbed him “the unofficial president”.
It also made him sound like the best of the bunch, always paying for other people’s drinks and generally being everyone’s best friend. But Estevez still recoils at references to the article, three decades on, and refuses to name the journalist who wrote it (David Blum). “If that’s the one thing he has offered the world, that’s a shame,” he grumbles, still smarting at the reductive term that preserved him – along with Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Andrew McCarthy and Ally Sheedy – in teen-dream amber for ever.
Anyway, on to The Public, which Estevez directed, wrote and stars in. The film, which wears its well-intended heart on its sleeve to a fault, is almost entirely set in a public library, and it imagines what would happen if the homeless people who sit there all day for warmth refused to leave in the evening when the library shut. Estevez plays the librarian fighting for the homeless people and it stars two other 80s heartthrobs: Estevez’s close friend, Christian Slater, and Alec Baldwin.
“I hadn’t seen Alec in 30 years, and I was pretty scared of him at first. Back in the day, when he first came on the scene we thought we were done. I was part of this group of scrappers – me, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn – and when Alec Baldwin came in the room the whole industry was like, OK, this guy’s a great actor, and he’s gorgeous! So we had this absolute jealousy of Alec Baldwin. But now here we are today working together, texting all the time and having a bromance.”
I tell him that for a certain kind of person – one who insists on asking about the Brat Pack, say – the thought of Estevez and Baldwin having any kind of romance is basically erotica. He makes a hoot of a laugh and, to his great credit, concedes the inevitable: in the hearts of an entire generation, he will forever be in 1985.
The Public is the first movie Estevez has directed that doesn’t include any members of his family: the little-loved 1990 garbagemen comedy, Men at Work, starred him and Charlie; 1996’s The War at Home, 2006’s Bobby – Estevez’s best film – and 2011’s The Way all featured or starred his father. Did he miss not having them around this time?
“No,” he answers immediately, then laughs. “When you work with family, you know what buttons to push because you helped to build the machine. There were times on The Way when my dad looked at me, not as his director, but as the 12-year-old boy he remembers running around in the backyard with a movie camera. I could see it in his eyes. We had massive fights on that film.”
As anyone with a family knows, massive fights are the flip side of being so close with someone that you feel you can say anything to them, and the Estevezes are famously close knit. Martin Sheen and his wife, Janet, have been happily married for almost 60 years. When Estevez and his three siblings were growing up – as well as Charlie, there’s another brother, Ramon, and a sister Renee – the whole family would travel wherever Martin was shooting, loading up the station wagon and all six of them shipping on out.
“My parents knew that if the family was to stay together, we had to stay together,” he says. They have maintained that setup as adults: Estevez, who is not married and has two adult children, mainly lives in LA “because it’s where my parents and siblings are”. In her book, Moore says part of the reason she fell in love with Estevez was because of his relationship with his family. Every weekend, the whole group, to her amazement, would gather at the family home and debate politics, led by Martin, a liberal activist. (She is somewhat less glowing about Estevez, whom she broke up with after suspicions of infidelity. But let’s not relitigate that past.)
In other interviews, Estevez has tended to go a bit terse when asked about his family. But the subject is unavoidable as soon as he walks into the room: these days he looks so much like his dad, it is startling. This is no surprise – after all, he played his father’s character on The West Wing, President Bartlett, in flashbacks. But it is very disorienting in person to look at the face of Martin Sheen and hear the voice of Emilio Estevez, and it makes his youthful insistence on keeping his real name when he went into acting, instead of adopting his father’s stage name, seem even more endearing. He may well have wanted to get by on his own merits, but his paternity is stamped all over his face.
His father urged him to keep Estevez, having always regretted changing his name. So it must have been pretty strange for both of them when Charlie didn’t just take on Sheen as a stage name but as his legal surname, too. (Martin is still Ramon Estevez on his driver’s licence.)
“I think Charlie felt he would get [questions about his name] either way. And he was always Charlie, never Carlos,” says Estevez a little protectively.
It’s tempting to look at the differences today between the two brothers – Estevez is contentedly scandal-free, Charlie has long been a walking flypaper for chaos – and trace them back to how they handled their famous parentage: whereas Estevez had a total lack of entitlement, Charlie needed everyone to know who his dad is. I interviewed Charlie three years ago and he was jittery and surrounded by dubious hangers-on. Estevez, by contrast, strolls in on his own and talks in eloquent, focused paragraphs. It is almost impossible to imagine him doing anything illegal; it’s hard to picture Charlie doing anything else.
“He’s been clean and sober for almost two years now. It’s a huge win for him but also for the whole family,” Estevez says with, it seems fair to assume, some understatement.
Estevez credits his own strong sense of values to being the eldest child. “When we were growing up in New York, my mother was a struggling artist and my father was a struggling actor. So until I was a teenager we were living pay cheque to pay cheque. They were really tumultuous times and, as I was the oldest, I absorbed it all more than my siblings,” he says.
When Estevez was 14 his father was cast in Apocalypse Now and the whole family decamped to the Philippines. I ask whether he thinks his personal stability comes from having grown up in a stable family, and he looks at me sceptically.
“Have you seen Hearts of Darkness?” he says, referring to Eleanor Coppola’s documentary about the chaotic making of that movie, during which Sheen drank rivers of booze and had a heart attack.
“I remember it,” he continues. “All of it. The household wasn’t always stable. My father is a different man now, and when he got sober he came back to the [Catholic] church and took up activism. So then I’d watch him get arrested on television and he’d be carted off shouting the Lord’s Prayer. He looked like a lunatic, and I found it embarrassing then. But I get it now.”
Estevez doesn’t act much any more, “because the stuff I was being offered was shit, and I’ve never given myself away”. He lives part of the year in LA and the rest in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he shot The Public. Cincinnati is not exactly known for celebrities and that’s why he likes it. But in classic Estevez style, he was drawn there because it’s where his mother is from. “Good midwestern values,” he says with satisfaction. “That’s why I feel so at home there.” He’s a good boy, Emilio, against all odds.
The Public is released in the UK on 21 February
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