Actor Andrew McCarthy on Rediscovering the Importance of Male Friendship

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Next, “Who Needs Friends.” That’s the title and subject of Andrew — actor Andrew McCarthy’s new book exploring male loneliness in America. As a member of the infamous Brat Pack of young actors from the 1980s, he starred in iconic films such as “Pretty in Pink,” one of my favorites, and the coming-of-age melodrama “St. Elmo’s Fire.” Now, he’s taken a 10,000-mile road trip across 22 states to reconnect with old friends, and he tells Hari Sreenivasan what he learned about human connection along the way.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Andrew McCarthy, thanks so much for joining us. You have a new book out called, “Who Needs Friends? An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendships Across America.” In the beginning of the book, you say that this sort of started with a, maybe a snarky question from your older son who was basically asking you, you don’t really have any friends, do you, dad? I mean, it’s powerful what kids can do to us, but what did that trigger for you?

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Well, yeah, we were, we were sitting at the kitchen table. He was telling me a funny story about one of his friends, and then he finished his story and looked up and just said exactly that. You don’t really have any friends, do you dad? And he didn’t, I don’t think he meant it too snark. He was just speaking truth as far as he knew it the way our kids do to us, you know? Constantly keep us humble and or humiliated. And it just got me thinking. It stayed with me. I said to him, I said, Sammy, yeah, you know, I do have friends. I just don’t see them, but I know they’re there and that’s enough. And he kind of went, okay. And, but that comment stayed with me. And a couple days later, I just said out loud to the empty kitchen, I said, you know what? It’s not enough. I need to go see my friends. 

And I’m like, many guys, I think, who when I left home at 17, came to the city and had this sort of core group of guys who became my chosen family. And, you know, they largely became responsible for me becoming who I’ve become and, and through life and jobs and families, whatever they scattered across the country. And I hadn’t seen any of them in years, some of ’em in decades. And so I, yeah, my son’s sort of comment made me go, I need to see these dudes.

SREENIVASAN: So this launched a, what turned out to be, a 22 state, 10,000 mile road trip that was kind of zigging and zagging. You write in the book when you were taking this tour, “What had actually happened to my friendships? Were they still there, as I claimed? Did I even want them? Or need them? What did I get from them anyway? What did I have to offer them? How did friendship affect my place in the world? What did I value? What mattered?” Those are all really big questions. What did you find?

MCCARTHY: Well, yeah, I mean, I have to say, I drove 10,000 miles because I hate highway driving. I’m terrified of trucks like on the highway. So I just drove back roads the entire country, which was an amazing thing to rediscover America like that again. But I also, what I found really interesting was I started talking to men as I went. I started talking to random men. I would approach in gas stations or on the street, or in motel lobbies or something. And I started talking to them about their friendships. So besides just reconnecting with my old friends, I started talking to men of all walks of life. Cops and blues musicians, and oil rig workers, and all sorts of guys. And it was amazing because – although all of them looked at me like I was insane when I first kind of walked up to ’em and said, will you talk to me about your friends? You know, they kind of said, huh? 

But then not a single guy refused to talk to me. They were all, and invariably everybody pretty much said, I’ve never talked about this before. I never talk about this stuff. So it’s fascinating to talk about. So I had amazing conversations with men who were very open to me all across the country. And you know, I found a lot of loneliness, a lot of isolation. I also found a lot of deep sort of connection and fellowship between men. And it’s a topic that we don’t deal with. I guess the biggest thing I’ve found is a topic that we just don’t deal with very much, to our own detriment.

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. And you know, the juxtaposition throughout the book of how many men, and some women, all know this, that we don’t deal with this well. In fact, they even point out, oh, my wife, my girlfriend, oh, she’s got great friends. She’s really connected. They – and you’re just like, wait, what’s the gap here? Why is that gap where when we can see how healthy relationships are nurtured and formed, and how people communicate, what were the reasons that you found that people – men weren’t?

MCCARTHY: Well, you’re true. You’re right. You say, a lot of guys I met said, yeah, I’m my – my wife is my best friend, but I’m not hers, a lot, right? And a lot of guys let their wives, you know, schedule all their social life. But I think guys, it comes down to, you know, they’re cliches, but I think it’s true that men have a fear of sort of admitting vulnerability, because vulnerability can be misconstrued somehow as weakness. And the one thing a man can’t be in our culture today is weak, right? And manhood has sort of evolved since sort of post World War II, John Wayne era. A man, a man in America certainly has become someone who’s stoic hard, pull your hat down, carry your own water, just shut up and get it done and bring it on. You know, and that’s not always the way it used to be with friendship with men in America. Back in the 19th century, you know, Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed were, dear – there’s lots of examples of men writing these profuse affectionate letters to each other, there’s a lot of physical affection. You know, so the idea of friendship in America changed in men, changed somewhere in the last a hundred years to a really sort of narrow focus. And I think to our detriment, because I think it’s just very isolating.

SREENIVASAN: You, you point out in the book that, look, it wasn’t always this way. I mean, that there were periods even in American history where even some of our leaders were expressing affection toward other men in a non-sexual way. Or, you know, that we had the capability and the vocabulary to say, “I love you” to another man and be fine with it. And society was fine with it. But it really is, you’re saying that kind of in this post World War II or whatever, that machismo image that – maybe it’s Hollywood, maybe it’s other places that have generated – we really kind of fall back on that as that’s the norm, and that’s how I should be.

MCCARTHY: Yeah. I mean, very much so. I did encounter – I met two guys in their seventies in Ohio, Lou and Bobby in Ohio. And they were former cops, and they were pretty tough guys. And I wandered up to ’em, and I walked up to ’em and I said – like I did to everybody – I said, can I, can I chat with you guys? And they went “sit down.” And anyway, they’ve been friends since they were 10 and 12 years old, for more than 60 years, they’ve been friends. And you know, Lou said to me at one point, he goes, you know, “we started saying, I love you to each other a couple years ago, you know, I tell my wife I love her. I tell my kids I love ’em. Why can’t I tell my best bud I love him?” And to which Bobby leaned over and said, “yeah, well, we haven’t graduated to a good night kiss yet.” But, which I think what you alluded to, I think there’s this sort of fear somehow this intimacy and/or that kind of thing being misconstrued with sexuality. And I just think it just gets in our way so much.

SREENIVASAN: You know, all the kind of longevity research points to the fact of how important social connection is. And there are groups of men who are getting together, whether it’s in a formalized setting or informal, they’re actually practicing this thing that now is being advocated, which is that you should have connections and relationships and feel useful and purposeful. And so many of the places that you describe, it’s like this was now part of their schedule, part of their ritual of life.

MCCARTHY: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I think one of the statistics I talk about in the book is Harvard just recently concluded an 85 year study saying that the single most important thing needed for a longer, healthier, happier life is not a good job or physical health, but connection to community, you know, and everywhere I went, I would often hang out in, I’d go to these small towns in local diners in the morning. And I just go – breakfast is the most optimistic meal of the day in America. And just, you go hang out in a diner and you park yourself there for a while, and you’ll see the whole world go by. And, you know, there was one place in Elkins, West Virginia, I went and it was a diner. And in the center of the room, there was this table of about six, eight guys, eight to 10 guys actually. And it was the big table in the middle of the room, and it was just older guys with their mesh caps on and their Carhartt jackets, and they’re just sitting there. And one would get up and another guy would come fill a spot. And I asked the people sitting next to – I was watching them fascinated, and I asked the people at the next table – I said is that the brain trust over there? And the lady said to me, she goes, yeah, well, they’d like to think so. 

And, but then she said, what exactly what you’re speaking to, she goes, at least they’ve got each other. And I think that’s exactly it. You know, they just come and these guys are gonna see each other tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. They just have a place to go and connect with and not feel so isolated. And I think there’s just so much isolation. You know, I asked pretty much everybody, every man I met along the way, I said, you ever feel lonely? And young guys were very quick to kind of go, oh, yeah, yeah, I’m lonely a lot. And older guys would invariably say, no, no, no. Too busy. Never feel lonely. And you know, I know when I answer that quick and that sharp, it’s either something I’m afraid of or I’m lying. And, but again, I think the admission of loneliness is tantamount to admitting weakness. You know? So people just pull back on that, and then, you know, keeps us further isolated. I think it’s pretty simple, and yet it’s something that’s so prevalent and something we have fallen prey to, you know.

SREENIVASAN: The inverse is also true, that loneliness is so bad for your health, right? I mean, you point out statistics that say it’s basically worse than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. You mentioned, it says there was a study, it was 2021 State of the American friendship report. Only 27% of men said they had six or more close friends, and 15% said they had none.

MCCARTHY: No close friends at all. Yeah. That’s up from 3% in 1990. So I mean, we’re going the wrong direction, for sure. And yeah, there’s also, you know, 50% risk increase of dementia for people that are isolated and lonely, I think a 38% risk of increase of heart disease. So it’s not just like, oh, loneliness is sad. It’s like, no, it’s physically affecting our health. And like you alluded to, it’s equivalent to, I think, 15 cigarettes a day and six alcoholic drinks a day. So, I mean, it’s really something that, you know, we ought to be addressing besides just feeling sort of bad about it.

SREENIVASAN: You know, our audience might – depending on their age – might not remember the movies that you were in. And well, you were called part of this club called the Brat Pack in the eighties. And, and, you know, you had kind of your own struggles with fame and that you weren’t really ready. It was sort of thrust upon you. And then you write about the fact that you actively kind of withdrew. And it might have also contributed to, you know, alcoholism and kind of different stages of your life that were difficult. What would you kind of tell yourself maybe at that point in your life about friendships and how important they would be 40 years from now?

MCCARTHY: So, you know, you alluded to being in the brat pack and all that stuff, and those, that time in life. And it was kind of a wondrous sort of exciting time. But I did feel sort of very overwhelmed. And had I known – you know, I retreated very much from that because I’m a fairly introverted person in certain ways. So had I sort of latched on to my peeps in a stronger way, I think I might have navigated through that easier. ‘Cause It’s just good to get out of our heads, you know? There’s a lot of nonsense that goes on up there when we don’t sort of blow it off. You know, you need a friend to kind of go, Hey, wait a minute, dude, what are you, what are you thinking? 

I was on the trip, and I – my wife said, how’s Matthew? I reconnected with my buddy in Kentucky. She said, how’s Matthew? I said, he’s great. He’s great. I said, what are you doing? I said, ah, just stupid stuff. And she said, that’s good. You need to do more stupid stuff. I go, sweetheart, I think I do a lot of stupid stuff. And she said, yeah, but you need to do the stupid stuff so you don’t do the really stupid stuff. I really understood what that meant. You know? I think we just need to sort of connect. I think it’s – whether male or female, although women seem to be much better at it in many ways than men. 

I think guys tend to be, you know, I heard a line, I’ve stolen it, that women make friends face to face, guys make friends shoulder to shoulder. You know, something in that with guys, you know, you hear men. I met a bunch of men from the military and stuff along my way, and they all talk about how, you know, obviously that’s a very bonding experience for guys and I, I think that’s really true that often with guys, we need to be sort of engaged in kind of an activity. I met one guy along the way, said he had a real hard time telling his daughter, his teenage daughter, that he loved her, but he thought nothing of jumping in the car and driving her eight hours back to college. You know what I mean? The action is demonstration of love for guys. I think in a very real way. We feel safe in that we know how to find ourselves in action.

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. There’s a passage you have with I can’t remember, I think it’s Marfa, Texas, where he talks about “get in the truck friends.” You know, like, the guys will just get in the truck and drive no questions asked if you ever – and and most men are like that, we value loyalty a tremendous amount. It’s like, who’s really gonna have my back for me? You have a quote from Epicurus, “It’s not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.” We really, we value that so much that we’re like, well, the, the small, I mean, you know, we kind of minimize the actual maintenance of that relationship and the words that go into it.

MCCARTHY: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s one of the things I sort of, why my friendship sort of slipped away, because I just knew. And I did know, even if I hadn’t seen him in a decade, I call up Ed and go, dude, I need help. He’s there. You know what I mean? But the active managing and involvement in friendship, it does something different too. Beside that sort of get in the truck quality, there’s – as I drove across America and meeting all these guys and reuniting with my friends, I felt sort of like this emotional safety net spread out underneath me in a certain way, in a way that I didn’t realize I’d been missing all these years.

I feel like many guys feel this great obligation to provide in life, whether it comes from, you know, the caveman and bringing the saber tooth tiger back into the cave or what – this notion that we need to provide.  That’s what we do. And I think a lot of men’s self-esteem rises and falls on the degree to which we feel we’re providing well. You know, and I have talked about this with my wife, and she’ll go, oh, sweetheart, we’re in this together, you know, and she’s absolutely right and everything. But I mentioned it to my guy friends, and they just go, I said, do you ever feel this? And they’re like, oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. It’s like the biggest thing in my life. So just that sort of, without talking about it any further, just that identification and understanding of that, you know, it’s not that that support’s better than my wife’s, it just – as my kids say – it just hits different, you know what I mean? And so I think we need both those kind of things.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you throughout the story, you’re kind of one of those get in the truck kind of friends for a front of your, Seve, and you know, you get to his apartment in Baltimore and you haven’t seen him in years and describe what was happening. What did you not know?

MCCARTHY: Well, Seve, my friend Seve, had terrible back pain. He had stenosis, narrowing of the spine. So he had to have a massive, you know, one of those eight hour back operations, and it just didn’t work. And so he, this wildly extroverted guy had become sort of largely a shut in just because he physically wasn’t able to maneuver. And I walked in and I, you know, he canceled on me a few times. And I was maybe being melodramatic to myself – but I thought, I don’t want the next time I see my friend to be at his funeral, I’m going to his house. So I just got in the car and I just drove to his house and just knocked on his door unannounced. And, you know, he opened the door and kinda went, “dude,” in that way the guys do. That dude contained a lot of ominous things in it. 

And anyway, his apartment was largely cluttered with all these Amazon delivery boxes and things. And I – like really cluttered, like there was no room for anything else. And it was just in that instant, I realized, wow, he’s, his world has become very small. But I also thought instantly that these sort of, all these boxes, I’m like, what is this? And I thought it was really sort of an act of hope. Like, clicking “buy now” for all these little things where just like when my life gets back on its feet, I’m gonna need all this stuff. You know what I mean? So, but again, he had just gotten isolated through the course of life. Stuff happens to all of us in life. We have our moments, you know, and he just needed – and I just showed up.

You know, I, I learned a lot on the trip, but the thing I learned the most of anything was just, you know, that cliche, 90% of life is showing up. Just show up. You know, I didn’t do anything right on this trip. I’m no expert on friendship. I’m no expert on any of this stuff. All I know is I showed up. I got in the car and I drove and I went to see him. You know, and there’s something Aristotle talks about the three levels of friendship and the deepest level, what do you call a perfect friendship is two friends, you know, two friends are improved by the relationship, and they’re able also to name the import of the relationship to each other. You know, I’d show up at my friend’s house and he’d say, you drove all this way to see me? And I was just like, dude, you know what? You’re important in my life. You mean a lot to me, and I just needed to come see you. And to which we were able to reciprocate that. You know, when we were younger, we probably never would’ve said that to each other. To be able to name the import of the relationship, I think it’s a huge – and I think women are very good at this and do it all the time, but guys, rarely.

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. Part of it was also interesting, you talk about how sometimes it’s that people are embarrassed to be seen not like their younger selves, right? They don’t have the capacity and capability. Like, you know, if your friendship was formed in your teens or your twenties or your thirties, and now you’re 60 or something, you’re like, ah, gosh, we used to go do all this stuff. I used to be so active, I could drink ’em under the table and now, eh, look at me.

MCCARTHY: Yeah. I think there’s a certain shame that comes with the relinquishing of some of the power that we had in our youth. That, again, but shame is one of those things that likes to keep us isolated and separate. I reunited with my friend Matthew in Kentucky, I mentioned earlier, and right when I saw him he started taking a pill, and it was like, what’s, what’s that for? He goes, oh, that’s from, ’cause I had that heart attack 13 years ago. And I’m like, dude, you had a heart attack. How did I not know that you had a heart attack 13 years ago? And, you know, and I – he was helping me with something. And I did, I looked at him, I said, you know what? I’m kind of ashamed to have gotten old, and for you to see me in this way. You know, I was feeling old. And he just looked at me and he went, whatever. You know what I mean? It was nothing to him. It’s like, this is life. And again, when we ___ in our own heads, this stuff is a big deal. But when we connect with people, they’re just like, yeah, we’re human. What’s the other option, you know?

SREENIVASAN: Author and actor Andrew McCarthy. The book is called, “Who Needs Friends? An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendships Across America.” Thanks so much for your time.

MCCARTHY: Oh, thank you.