Anthony Michael Hall Talks ‘Nation’s Dumbest’, ‘Vacation’ & More with Rich

Anthony Michael Hall has a GED he is proud of, and a new Fox show that made him wish he had paid more attention in high school.

"Honestly, there was a lot of stuff. Geography, math, science, things I didn't do well with in high school," Hall said of Nation's Dumbest, the celebrity competition series airing Wednesdays at 9 Eastern. The objective, as he described it, was less about winning than escaping. "The goal is to get off the show as soon as possible, which we were all endeavoring to do."

Matt Leinart apparently endeavored hardest. Hall said the format got in his head. "He was sweating it like it was the playoffs when he was playing." Ice-T was a trip, Steve-O was great, Carmen Electra cursed enough to make Hall root for more of it, and host Jack Whitehall carried himself like a man with the answers even though, per Hall, "he didn't know what the hell was going on either."

Hall started earning long before any of that. He was doing plays and commercials as a kid in the 1970s, cashing residual checks while he was still in elementary school. A Honeycomb cereal spot. A Nerf soccer ball ad. A Bounty paper towel commercial with Nancy Walker, quicker picker upper and all. "Things you got to do to earn a buck," he said.

The door to the rest of it opened on Vacation, which Harold Ramis directed from a John Hughes script. Hall was 14. He remembers the Grand Canyon shoot and working with John Candy, and he remembers that the ending everyone knows was not the one they shot. The original had Chevy Chase's character holding the theme park's Walt Disney-style founder hostage. Test audiences wanted the family to actually reach the park, so roughly eight months after the wrap, they went back to Magic Mountain and shot the version with Candy at the gate.

Then came the run with Hughes himself. Sixteen Candles first, then The Breakfast Club, then Weird Science, all of them small budgeted, none of them expected to land the way they did. "We had no idea," Hall said. "These were small budgeted films at the time. John Hughes was a new director."

Working method mattered more than budget. Hughes built in about a week of rehearsal before blocking anything, then shot the scene as written for two or three takes and told everyone to mix it up. That license is where a lot of the film's texture came from. Hall grew up on Richard Pryor and George Carlin albums, and he would run Pryor bits at Hughes' house on weekends purely to make him laugh. Hughes started writing them in. "That became the scene in Weird Science, too, at the Blues Bar."

Hughes' output ran ahead of the schedule. Two weeks into The Breakfast Club, he found Hall in a hallway and pitched the next one. "He goes, it's going to be you and this other kid. You're going to create a girl in the computer. I'm like, what?" Hughes had written an entire act of Weird Science the night before, after wrapping.

The last conversation Hall had with him came around 1988, and Candy was on the line too. They talked for a couple of hours, and Hughes floated an idea he could not shake: the five Breakfast Club characters, reunited later in life, in their 30s, in the workforce. "I don't know if he had written it or not, but he just was so prolific."

Rich, who screened The Breakfast Club for his own kids, said his two oldest paused it to ask when it becomes tomorrow. It does not. That is the point, and the film still lands with people half their age. Hall is not precious about it. "I can't believe I have like a handful of movies that are over 40, which makes me feel 107."

He is unbothered by the Brat Pack label too, decades after the article that coined it. "I always thought the Rat Pack was cooler than the Brat Pack." He watched Andrew McCarthy's documentary about it and found it interesting, though he had a note. "I thought it was mostly about Andrew McCarthy."

What he keeps coming back to is gratitude for Ramis and Matty Simmons and Hughes, the ones who saw something in a kid. "The shoulders who I stood on."