Andrew McCarthy

Andrew McCarthy is an American actor, travel writer, television director, and author born on November 29, 1962, in Westfield, New Jersey, where he was the third of four boys. His mother worked for a newspaper, and his father worked in investments and stocks. As a teenager, McCarthy relocated to Bernardsville, New Jersey, attending both Bernards High School and the Pingry School, a preparatory academy. His first experience with acting came at Pingry, where he played the Artful Dodger in a production of Oliver!. He later enrolled at NYU to study acting but was expelled after two years.

McCarthy's screen career began with a role in the 1983 comedy Class, opposite Jacqueline Bisset. He went on to become associated with the group of young Hollywood actors the media labeled the Brat Pack, appearing in St. Elmo's Fire in 1985 and Pretty in Pink in 1986. That same year, he starred in Heaven Help Us alongside Donald Sutherland and Kevin Dillon, playing the character Michael Dunn. In 1987, he appeared in both Mannequin and Less than Zero, the latter an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel. He followed those with Fresh Horses and Kansas in 1988, and the comedy Weekend at Bernie's in 1989. VH1 ranked him No. 40 on its list of the 100 Greatest Teen Stars of all time.

McCarthy made his Broadway debut in The Boys of Winter, a credit verified in records placing his Broadway activity between 1985 and 2005. He returned to the stage in Side Man, a production that won the 1999 Tony Award for Best Play. He also participated in The 24 Hour Plays in 2004.

His television work has been extensive. In 2004, he played Dr. Hook in Kingdom Hospital, and in 2005 he appeared in five episodes of the NBC series E-Ring. In 2008, he starred in the NBC series Lipstick Jungle as billionaire Joe Bennett and had a minor role in The Spiderwick Chronicles. McCarthy directed multiple episodes of the CW series Gossip Girl, including the fourth-season episode "Touch of Eva," and directed episodes of Netflix's Orange Is the New Black, a project for which he became particularly recognized as a director. In 2010 and 2011, he appeared in the USA series White Collar and returned the following season to direct the episode "Neighborhood Watch." He directed three episodes of Season 2 of NBC's The Blacklist in 2015, a series starring James Spader and Megan Boone. In 2016, he starred in the ABC drama The Family, and from 2020 to 2021 he held a recurring role in NBC's Good Girls. In 2022, he joined the cast of The Resident as Ian Sullivan, a pediatric surgeon and the estranged father of the character Cade.

In 2003, McCarthy was set to guest star in two episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, but series creator Dick Wolf decided against it following reported difficulties on set involving actor Vincent D'Onofrio. Wolf stated publicly that McCarthy had engaged in fractious behavior, while McCarthy responded that he had been fired for refusing to accept threats and bullying from a fellow actor. He later appeared in a 2007 episode of the same series, in a storyline featuring Chris Noth rather than D'Onofrio.

Alongside his acting and directing career, McCarthy has built a substantial body of work as a travel writer. He served as Editor at Large at National Geographic Traveler and received the Society of American Travel Writers' award for Travel Journalist of the Year in 2010. In February 2015, National Geographic published his piece "A Song for Ireland," which documented his return to the townland of Lacka West in the parish of Duagh in County Kerry, Ireland, the place from which his great-grandfather John McCarthy had emigrated in the late 1800s. His 2012 book The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down was published that year, and in 2017 Algonquin Books published his YA novel Just Fly Away, which became a New York Times bestseller. Grand Central Publishing released his memoir Brat: An '80s Story in May 2021, and in 2023 the same publisher released Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain, an account of his walk along the Camino de Santiago with his son Sam during the summer of 2021.

Among his film awards, McCarthy won the Fantafestival Best Actor prize in 1987 for Mannequin. He also won the Grand Prize for Best Short Film at the Rhode Island International Film Festival in 2004 and Best Short Film at the Sedona International Film Festival in 2005, both for News for the Church, a film that qualified as an official Academy Awards entry for Best Live Action Short Film.

In his personal life, McCarthy has spoken publicly about a serious alcohol problem that began at age 12. He entered a detoxification program in 1992 and has been sober since. On October 9, 1999, he married Carol Schneider, whom he had first dated nearly two decades earlier. Their son Sam was born in 2002 and later became an actor. McCarthy and Schneider divorced in 2005. On August 28, 2011, McCarthy married Irish writer and director Dolores Rice; they have two children, Willow and Rowan.