On his last day of school before filming the 1987 cult classic The Lost Boys, Corey Feldman was about to get a swirly. He’s telling the story over Zoom, and as he approaches the climactic moment, he uses his hands to show how close to the toilet he’d come. Then he did something remarkable: He watched himself, double-checking that his hand was actually within the narrow frame of his cellphone camera.
Most people would never have thought to do that, but Feldman is not like most people. He has spent almost all of his 51 years in front of one lens or another, and while he has found his own version of normal, that experience has marked him; left a nagging voice in the back of his head telling him to shift his fingers a few centimeters to the side. It’s a small moment, born out of decades of habit and made all the more impressive because he didn’t even pause the story.
As for the 35th anniversary of The Lost Boys, which was released on July 31st, 1987, “It’s bittersweet,” Feldman says. “Brooke McCarter is gone. He was a big part of when we would do these reunions, generally, the conventions and things like that, Brooke was a big part of it, so that was very sad. Of course, we lost Richard Donner last year, and so nothing is the same.”
The former child star is running out of peers. There aren’t so many people who grew up on Hollywood sets, who have built their adult lives in the shadow of the past, and who understand the nagging voice that orders you to check that your fingers are in frame. “We have the definite joy that comes with revisiting the past,” he says, while noting that so many of The Lost Boys are now “people that [I’ve] lost.” Check out the full interview above.
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