John Kapelos has Rick Moranis to thank for paving the way to “a high point of my film career” — playing Carl the janitor in John Hughes’s 1985 classic The Breakfast Club.
“It’s a movie I’m very proud of, and that John Hughes also went to bat for me on,” says the London, Ont.-born actor, reminiscing about Hughes’s comedy-drama focusing on five high-schoolers — a delinquent (Judd Nelson), neurotic outcast (Ally Sheedy), brainiac (Anthony Michael Hall), jock (Emilio Estevez) and popular girl (Molly Ringwald) — who bare their souls during detention in the school library.
“It’s emblematic of a lot of good things,” said Kapelos, who’ll be mopping up again March 21 and 25 when a digitally remastered version screens at SilverCity as part of its 30th-anniversary re-release.
Hughes, who also directed Kapelos in Sixteen Candles and Weird Science, had in 1983 told the actor “you’re going to be as big as Bill Murray” when he made this “other little movie,” The Breakfast Club. So Kapelos, who was appearing in Second City’s off-Broadway hit Orwell That Ends Well, was disappointed to read in Variety in January of 1984 that filming had begun in Chicago, with Moranis playing the janitor.
“I let out this unspeakably long groan and said: ‘I guess that’s gone away,’ ” said Kapelos, who cheered up when his agent called the next day to say Hughes wanted him in Chicago immediately.
Moranis had reinvented the straight-shooting janitor as a caricature with a ridiculously thick Russian accent, prompting irate producer Ned Tanen to demand the actor be replaced.
Enter Kapelos, the Second City alumnus once taught by John Candy.
Although Hughes encouraged him to put his own spin on the philosophical janitor, a monologue in which Carl tells the students “where they’re going to be 30 years from now” landed on the cutting room floor.
“I point to Molly and say: ‘You’re going to have five kids and stretch marks from here to Toledo, and you’re going to be an alcoholic and unfulfilled woman,” Kapelos, 59, recalled. “I say to Michael: ‘You’re going to be a big-money lawyer, and have a big heart attack, and a big funeral at 42.’ Then I read the riot act to Judd Nelson and say: ‘You’re going to spend five years at Attica for armed robbery and then go to Chino for five years for felony and hit-and-run.’ Down the line I was just delineating what a grim, bleak future they were going to have.”
Kapelos will never forget how the late film editor Dede Allen broke the news about his monologue’s fate.
“She said: ‘I remember cutting Gene Hackman out of Bonnie and Clyde’ and I went: ‘What, what?’ ” he said, recalling with a laugh how she then used her fingers to simulate scissors before declaring: “Out!”
As tough as that was, Kapelos — who was also in Hughes’s 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off until his scenes as a Russian cabbie were cut — understood. And he wasn’t alone in having material removed from Hughes’s tale of teenage angst “because it didn’t serve the film.”
Ringwald, Sheedy and co-producer Michelle Manning objected so strongly to gratuitous female nudity in the original screenplay, for example, that Hughes cut some of his own material. He replaced a topless swimming coach (Karen Leigh Hopkins) the students spy on through a locker-room peephole with a janitor.
The elimination process was an integral part of Hughes’s methodology, recalled Kapelos, noting Hughes often shot several takes.
“He’d say: ‘OK, try to improvise something here,’ ” said Kapelos, who had a similar experience creating Rudy Ryszczyk, the “oily bohunk” fiancé in Sixteen Candles.
“Acting and improvising are two different skillsets I happen to have. One is creative and one is re-creative.”
Kapelos, 27 at the time, admits he didn’t realize how special The Breakfast Club was until he witnessed reaction from hundreds of teenagers at a huge suburban Chicago movie theatre
“I went ‘Holy …’ There’s something going on here,” he said, theorizing the reason was because Hughes didn’t condescend to his audience.
“It resonates because it hits some fundamental truth,” said Kapelos, who has reunited with some of the Brat Packers, including Hall and Sheedy, “a very sweet woman,” for an episode of The Dead Zone.
“Molly and I connected last week when she was performing at the [Hollywood jazz club] Catalina Bar and Grill with her jazz quartet,” he said.
Kapelos, whose recent roles include Picker, the homicidal henchman in the hit FX series Justified, has had a flourishing career since.
Highlights include roles as the millionaire who hires Richard Gere’s hitman in Internal Affairs, a lustful fireman in Roxanne, an anguished father in The Deep End of the Ocean, and Canadian actor Bruno Gerussi in Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus. Kapelos also played a middle-aged Lothario who falls for a French divorcée (Alexandra Stewart) in Croon, Hilary Pryor’s bittersweet 2002 romantic-comedy filmed in Victoria.
“I was supposed to do another film in Victoria but it fell apart,” laments the actor, who is also a singer-songwriter preparing for the release of his new album, Too Hip for the Room.
The album’s tracks include Don’t You Forget About Me, and his playful jazz version of Noel Coward’s Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage.