Entertainment

A ‘BRAT’ COMES BACK

Eighties film star Andrew McCarthy was hanging around one day on a Manhattan location for NBC’s “Lipstick Jungle,” wondering ‘What would Joe Bennett do?’ for a street scene in which his character calls designer Victory Ford, played by Lindsay Price.

“Joe’s not bound by any of the laws the rest of us are bound by,” says McCarthy on the phone from Ireland, where he’s building a house with his wife of nine years, Carol Schneider. “He doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do. It sounds so great, but only Jack Nichol-son really lives that way.”

In the scene, McCarthy decided Bennett, a billion-aire who thinks nothing of taking a private jet to Miami to grab some stone crabs for lunch, would saunter across a busy Manhattan street while phoning Ford, completely obviously to the fact that traffic was piling up behind him.

“We rehearsed it just once, and I crossed the street and stopped traffic. It illuminated some things about the character,” a man to whom McCarthy relates.

“Joe Bennett’s me on a great day. He’s expansive, he offers empathy and he gives people credit for being better than they are,” says McCarthy, who suggested that he play Bennett when he was first approached to co-star with Brooke Shields in the NBC drama.

As written in the Candace Bushnell novel, Bennett was much a older man. “They initially talked to me about playing Brooke’s husband. My response was, ‘I’m too short to play Brooke’s husband.’ I’m 5′ 8” and she’s six feet.’ “

McCarthy, now 45, got his start in 1983 at 19, when he co-starred with Rob Lowe in the movie “Class.” He quickly went on to become one of the most recognizable actors of his generation. In 1985, he starred in “Pretty in Pink” with Brat Pack princess Molly Ringwald and James Spader. “St. Elmo’s Fire” followed in 1986, with pretty much the same gang – Lowe, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy.

“There’s something in those movies that exists for the audi-ence [but] doesn’t exist for me,” McCarthy says. The actor, who grew up in Westfield, New Jersey, is not in touch with any of his fellow ’80s stars although Lowe (“Brothers & Sisters”) and Spader (“Boston Legal”) are now well-established TV stars.

“They live in LA, I live in New York,” he says.

He admits that “many of these movies did define a generation, even though we certainly didn’t feel that was going to be the case when we were making them. We were just going to work.

“They were some of the first movies that really gave respect to people of that age. That’s why people identified with them. Those characters – who often represented kids who felt invisible in the world – could say, ‘Hey, yeah, I’m seen.’ People just want to be seen, don’t they?”

Now that the network is pleased enough with “Lipstick Jungle” to send the writers back to work on more episodes, it seems fair to ask McCarthy if he’s making a Patrick Dempsey-like comeback.

The actor is philosophical. “I’m older now. You never know what’s going to click. You can think something is terrific and then nothing happens with it. It’s always nice when things do well and you get a lot of attention. But we’ll have to see how this goes, it’s early days. Still, I think it’s a nice profile to have. Playing Joe Bennett is better than playing the UPS guy.”