Judd Nelson Quotes

I did a Moonlighting episode because I was friends with Whoopi [Goldberg, who guest-starred in the same episode], and she asked me to do it and I did it. But yeah, that was my first regular on a series, and it's because I'd met Brooke Shields a number of years earlier at a charity event.

Though [John] Hughes did provide for us, if we wanted, to go to a local high school and try to blend in. Michael [Hall] and Molly [Ringwald ] already had school to go to with their tutors. Ally [Sheedy] wanted nothing to do with high school. She said, "I remember it fine. I don't want to go back." Which is great. So Emilio [Estevez] and I went. And Emilio lasted a couple hours because people recognized him from The Outsiders that had already been out, so his cover was blown.

I would go to trials a lot in Boston, as best I could. And it's incredible that, like, lawyers that had a good case weren't dramatic at all. Lawyers that had a horrible case would sing and dance and do whatever it took to convince the jury or the judge that this guy was innocent. So that was a cool thing to see because that made me believe that what the script [of From The Hip] was doing was totally believable. Now, maybe not ordinary. But it could happen.

I think that there's room for everyone. I don't think that if one person succeeds then another must fail. That's lunacy. I'm not sure what the reasons are for my philosophy, maybe it's the fact that if there are ten people doing the same job, we all know how we feel and what our high points and low points are.

I worked with the late Leonard Frey. I did a play, and I would have these ideas and he would say, "I don't know. Try it." And I would try it and it would be awful, and he would go, "What do you think?" And I would go, "It was awful." And he goes, "Okay, we'll try something else." And that's great because it really makes you feel less working-for and more working-with. There's nothing better than to feel a part of the team.

I don't know if it matters what country you're from, size of the city you're from, urban or rural, there are people that are hurting each other everywhere.

[John] Hughes really wanted it to sound authentic. He was a real collaborator. He encouraged us to bring to the material things we thought were maybe more truthful.

We [ with Emilio Estevez] asked if we could take some things [ in Breakfast Club] that weren't in the shooting draft, but from earlier drafts, "Can we maybe use this?" And Hughes was very amenable to all that. And there was some stuff that I liked, and I said, "How about this?" And he went, "Well, we'll check with Molly [Ringwald]. Those scenes are with her. And if she likes it, fine." So it was just wonderful. It was great.

It's strange, 'cause a play, you start at the beginning and you go all the way through to the end. So it's naturally very well rehearsed and you get a rhythm and a flow. In film, you can shoot the ending before the beginning. It's very odd. And it's like a craft you have to learn.

I wanted to meet Orson Welles. So I was like, whatever, somehow get me in on this. I'm able to get cast in it, but Orson Welles worked alone. He worked before all of us worked. He didn't want to work with anyone else.

I don't know if one's more typecasting than the other, or what I am more like. But I know that the high school I went to was a private school. It was prep school. It was a boarding school. So we didn't have a shop class. We didn't have Saturday detention. We went to school on Saturday. We did have Sunday study, which you very rarely get, because then you have 13 straight days of school. Who wants that?

Stagecoach is really my first Western, actually.