I practically made it my job to watch John Hughes movies like Weird Science when I was a kid. In fact, I would rank Weird Science, which you can watch with a YouTubeTV subscription, in my top three favorites alongside The Breakfast Club and the (admittedly problematic) Sixteen Candles. Recently, I was watching some scenes from the movie and got to wondering about the “other” star of the movie, alongside Hughes regular Anthony Michael Hall, Ilan Mitchell-Smith, who played Wyatt. I realized I have not seen him in anything for years, but it turns out this isn’t a tragic story of a young actor who fell on hard times.
Mitchell-Smith Is A College Professor Now
Far too often we hear stories about child and teenage actors going down dark paths in their adulthood, often involving drugs and alcohol, mental illness, or both. I’ll be honest, it’s something I usually expect when I think about actors like Ilan Mitchell-Smith, who were briefly big stars but faded out of the public consciousness. Happily in this case, Mitchell-Smith simply shifted careers and left Hollywood behind.
After his career stalled in Hollywood after the success of Weird Science, he went to college, first earning a bachelor’s in Medieval Studies at UC Davis, before getting his master's in the same subject at Fordham in New York City. From there, he moved to College Station, TX, and earned his PhD in Medieval English Literature at Texas A&M. Today, he is an associate professor at Cal State-Long Beach, where, according to his bio, he “teaches a range of early- and late-medieval British Literature courses, and he is Co-Director of the CSULB Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.”
He Still Dabbles In Hollywood Occasionally
Mitchell-Smith’s first success came in the mid-’80s, with the movie called the “spiritual successor to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the underrated comedy The Wild Life. It was his next movie, Weird Science, that brought his biggest success. Hall and Mitchell-Smith played high school kids who created a woman (Kelly LeBrock) using their computer, and chaos ensues. After that movie, though, his opportunities dried up a little, and while he was a regular in the TV show Superboy in 1988, he only had a handful more credits after that.
Still, he occasionally works in Hollywood, like appearing in an episode of The Goldbergs, in an homage to Weird Science in 2013. He also did voice work in Axe Cop in 2013 as well. Otherwise, he seems perfectly content with his life as a professor and as a tabletop game enthusiast. He’s written about Dungeons & Dragons, and using all of his skills to write about Medieval movies and TV shows.
All in all, I was really happy to see that Mitchell-Smith isn’t another example of a teenage star who didn’t quite know how to handle it when Hollywood moved on. Like another star from the John Hughes universe, Michael Schoeffling, who played Jake in Sixteen Candles and quit Hollywood to become a woodworker, these stories are great to hear.
