Anthony Michael Hall

Anthony Michael Hall (born Michael Anthony Thomas Charles Hall; April 14, 1968) is an American actor.

He is best known for starring in films with John Hughes, which include the teen films Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science.

Michael Anthony Thomas Charles Hall was born on April 14, 1968, in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.

He is the only child of blues-jazz singer Mercedes Hall's first marriage.

She divorced Hall's father, Larry, an auto-body-shop owner, when their son was six months old.

When Hall was three, he and his mother relocated to the West Coast, where she found work as a featured singer.

After a year and a half, they returned to the East, eventually moving to New York City, where Hall grew up.

Hall's ancestry is English, Irish and Italian.

He has one half-sister, Mary Chestaro, from his mother's second marriage to Thomas Chestaro, a show business manager.

His half-sister is pursuing a career as a singer under the name of Mary C. Hall uses the name Anthony, rather than Michael.

He transposed his first and middle names when he entered show business because there was another actor named Michael Hall who was already a member of the Screen Actors Guild.

Hall attended St. Hilda's & St. Hugh's School of New York before moving on to Manhattan's Professional Children's School.

Hall began his acting career at age eight and continued throughout high school.

"I did not go to college," he has said, "but I'm an avid reader in the ongoing process of educating myself."

His stage debut was in 1977, when he was cast as the young Steve Allen in Allen's semi-autobiographical play The Wake.

He went on to appear in the Lincoln Center Festival's production of St. Joan of the Microphone, and in a play with Woody Allen.

Through the 1980s, Hall's mother managed his career, eventually relinquishing that role to her second husband.

At the age of seven, Hall started his career in commercials.

He was the Honeycomb cereal kid and appeared in several commercials for toys and Bounty.

In 1980, he made his screen debut in the Emmy-winning TV movie The Gold Bug, in which he played the young Edgar Allan Poe.

In 1981 he started as Huck Finn in Rascals and Robbers: The Secret Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn but it was not until the release of the 1982 Kenny Rogers film Six Pack that he gained real notice.

The following year, Hall landed the role of Rusty Griswold, Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo's son, in National Lampoon's Vacation, catching the attention of the film's screenwriter John Hughes, who was about to make the jump to directing.

"For [Hall] to upstage Chevy, I thought, was a remarkable accomplishment for a 13-year-old kid," said Hughes.

The film was a significant box office hit in 1983, grossing over $61 million in the United States.

Hall's breakout role came in 1984, when he was cast as "The Geek", the scrawny, braces-wearing geek who pursued Molly Ringwald's character in John Hughes's directing debut Sixteen Candles.

Hall tried to avoid the clichés of geekiness.

"I didn't play him with 100 pens sticking out of his pocket," he said.

"I just went in there and played it like a real kid. The geek is just a typical freshman."

Hall landed a spot on the promotional materials along with co-star Ringwald.

Reviews of the film were positive for Hall and his co-stars, and one for People Weekly even claimed that Hall's performance "pilfer[ed] the film" from Ringwald.

Despite achieving only moderate success at the box office, the film made overnight stars of Ringwald and Hall.

Hall diversified his roles to avoid becoming typecast as his geek persona, joining the cast of Saturday Night Live (1985–1986) and starring in films such as Out of Bounds (1986), Johnny Be Good (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Six Degrees of Separation (1993).

After Vacation, Hall moved on to other projects and declined to reprise his role in the 1985 sequel.

In 1985, Hall starred in two additional teen-oriented films written and directed by Hughes.

He was cast as Brian Johnson, "the brain," in The Breakfast Club, co-starring Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Molly Ringwald.

After a series of minor roles in the 1990s, he starred as Microsoft's Bill Gates in the 1999 television film Pirates of Silicon Valley.

He had the leading role in the USA Network series The Dead Zone from 2002 to 2007.

In 2008, he appeared in a minor role in The Dark Knight.

Since 2019, Hall has appeared in ABC's The Goldbergs.

He starred in the slasher film Halloween Kills (2021).