Anthony Michael Hall
Anthony Michael Hall is an actor, born 1968.
Anthony Michael Hall was 15 when he played Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon's Vacation, and 16 and 17 for the three John Hughes films that made him famous. He is the geek in Sixteen Candles, Brian Johnson in The Breakfast Club, and Gary in Weird Science. What is striking about all three now is how unsentimental he is about the character. Brian is not brave, and he is not secretly cool. He is anxious, needy and funny, and Hall plays it without ever asking to be liked.
Being famous between 15 and 17 is also a trap. The Hughes films fixed him at an age he was already leaving, and the decade after them is scattered. The best evidence that another actor was in there is Edward Scissorhands, where he plays Jim, the girlfriend's boyfriend, as a genuinely mean drunk with no comic escape hatch. It is a small, nasty performance and it works completely.
The second half of the career has been steady character work rather than stardom. He played Bill Gates in Pirates of Silicon Valley, carried The Dead Zone for six seasons on television, and has since turned up as functionaries and heavies in The Dark Knight, Foxcatcher and Halloween Kills, and on Reacher. A career shaped like this usually gets written up as a fall. It looks more like a working actor who outlived a label.
Movies (36)
- The Dark Knight (2008)
- Edward Scissorhands (1990)
- National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)
- The Breakfast Club (1985)
- Halloween Kills (2021)
- Sixteen Candles (1984)
- Live by Night (2016)
- Trigger Warning (2024)
- Weird Science (1985)
- War Machine (2017)
- Freddy Got Fingered (2001)
- Foxcatcher (2014)
- Air Force One Down (2024)
- Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)
- Six Degrees of Separation (1993)
- All About the Benjamins (2002)
- Clerks III (2022)
- Trojan War (1997)
- 61* (2001)
- Johnny Be Good (1988)
- Happy Accidents (2000)
- Last Man Standing (2011)
- Dead in Tombstone (2013)
- The Grave (1996)
- Natural Selection (2016)
- Results (2015)
- Sexy Evil Genius (2013)
- Six Pack (1982)
- Bodied (2018)
- Who Do I Gotta Kill? (1994)
TV (11)
Where to start with Anthony Michael Hall
Everyone starts with The Breakfast Club, and they should, but watch it with your attention on him rather than on the ensemble: he has the least glamorous job in the film and gives the most honest performance in it.
Then break the pattern immediately with Edward Scissorhands, where he plays exactly the kind of boy who would have bullied Brian Johnson, and does it with no charm whatsoever. Those two back to back are the argument for him as an actor.
Weird Science and Sixteen Candles complete the Hughes set and have aged unevenly, which is worth knowing before you press play. Pirates of Silicon Valley is the surprise, a television film about Apple and Microsoft in which his Bill Gates is stranger and better than the format deserved. The Dead Zone is the long-form lead he never got in cinema, and The Dark Knight shows the character-actor phase in about four minutes.
The John Hughes films
Three films in two years that defined how American cinema saw adolescence, and he is the through-line in all of them. Brian in The Breakfast Club is the character Hughes clearly identified with most.
The reinvention
He grew about a foot, which ended the typecasting, and spent the nineties deliberately taking parts against it. Edward Scissorhands casts him as the bully, and The Dead Zone gave him six seasons as a lead.
The recent work
The character-actor years. The Dark Knight is the biggest credit, Foxcatcher is the prestige one, and Halloween Kills and Reacher are the genre work that keeps the schedule full.