When Kerri Green auditioned for her first movie, she was a cheerleader at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale.
Andrea “Andy” Carmichael makes her entrance in The Goonies leading a cheer squad.
“I was typecast,” Green says with a laugh, reflecting on the experience more than 40 years later. The cherished ’80s film remains her most enduring, widely seen performance.
Goonies never say die. And the mantra couldn’t be more true. The movie, known for its gang of young adventurers, pirate ship and booby traps, never really faded from view. After debuting in theaters in June 1985, The Goonies took off on VHS, delighting a generation of kids and successive generations.
“Down here, it’s our time,” protagonist Mikey Walsh—current Screen Actors Guild president Sean Astin—says in the movie as the characters explore underground caves and water slides. If plans pan out, it will soon be time again, with original co-writer and producer Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Chris Columbus backing a sequel.
“I hope it happens,” Green tells New Jersey Monthly.
For now, the actor and her Goonies co-star Corey Feldman, who played Mouth in the movie, are headed to NJPAC in Newark on Friday, March 20 to celebrate the recent 40th anniversary of the film with a screening and Q&A.
Green and Feldman. Photo: Courtesy of Tomas Flint Photography
Green, 59, spent her first years in West Nyack, New York before moving to Woodcliff Lake with her family when she was 8. She says she had a “typical” suburban childhood—bike rides to buy candy bars and visit the town pool.
“The play at our middle school (Woodcliff Middle School) was kind of the only thing that if you tried out, you got in,” she says. “Somebody had said to my mom because I had red hair and freckles, I could maybe do commercials, and that’s kind of how I even started auditioning in New York City. It was something we kind of fell into. And something my mother likes to say is that we won the lottery, we didn’t even know we bought a ticket.”
The young actor got her SAG card doing a laundry detergent commercial and her hand appeared in a soap opera (“not me, just my hand”). But the idea that she would be in rooms auditioning with Spielberg and director Richard Donner was “so out of our realm of reality,” she says. They weren’t a Hollywood or acting family, so when she was cast in The Goonies as a teen, it was a “big, big change,” says Green, who is now bicoastal.
The Audition and Goonies School
In the movie, Andy’s piano-playing skills help the Goonies evade the thuggish Fratelli family.
One wrong note on an organ made of bones and they risk being tossed from a precipice. But thanks to Andy’s courage, they’re able to find One-Eyed Willy’s pirate ship and make a run at his treasure so they can stop developers from turning their homes into a golf course. (Andy is less successful at recognizing her crush in a dark cave, kissing his younger brother instead.)
Being cast as Andy was a multi-step process. On Green’s second visit to a casting director, she talked with Spielberg. Her third appearance involved some improv for Donner, the director. There was no script, just some pages with character description and a scene that didn’t make it into the film “because they were very secretive about the script,” Green says. In the improv session, Green and another actor had to talk about a “Brand, this cute boy.” (Josh Brolin hadn’t yet been cast in the role.) Green took off her shoes to put her feet up on a couch during the tryout.
“When I finished the scene, I looked down and my shoes are gone,” Green says. “Dick Donner had hidden them. I looked down and I looked around … and we just started cracking up and then kind of went with it. I was, like ‘OK, bye!’ pretending to leave without my shoes and everything. He was so much fun. He was just always joking around like that. I think he was looking for a cast and kids that like to have fun like that and thought that kind of thing was funny.”
Donner, who also directed the Superman and Lethal Weapon films, died in 2021, at 91 years old. But Green will never forget the playful audition.
“I remember I cried to my best friend,” she says. “I was like ‘I didn’t get it.’ So when we got the call, I couldn’t believe it. Honestly, I still can’t believe it.”
Production on the Oregon-set film was supposed to last 12 weeks and ended up running five months in three locations, plus a “surprise trip to Hawaii,” Green says.
“We were all still in school. So we were not just on the set together, but when we weren’t onstage, we were in a classroom together. So it was five solid months at one of the most impressionable times for all of us. So we are bonded in a very family way in that when we see each other, we are immediately back in those roles. We are immediately back at that age. We feel like a family. And I’ve joked around, like ‘a dysfunctional family.’ But it really is true. (It was) really such an unbelievable thing to happen to all of us at that time. No matter how much time goes by, it just feels like family.”
Green graduated from Pascack Hills High, but she says she “never really went back” after filming, which started the fall of her senior year. Her young career was taking flight. “I was only home back in New Jersey for about two weeks before I went down to St. Petersburg, Florida to film Summer Rental (the Carl Reiner movie with John Candy was also released in 1985) and then that was a couple of months, and then I was home only for a couple of days before I went to Chicago to film Lucas (she starred in the 1986 film opposite Corey Haim). While I was on the set of Lucas, I flew back for graduation.”
On the Goonies set, “I had this crazy advantage,” Green says. “Our English class was doing Hamlet. Robert Davi (who plays Jake Fratelli) saw what I was reading, and he couldn’t help himself. He takes the book and starts reading the most famous soliloquies, and he’s this trained actor. So I had kind of a different English class.”
The VHS Generation and the Sequel
Green says the movie’s success on home video and TV was “like a quiet snowball.”
A generation of kids grew up with The Goonies like how her generation grew up with with The Wizard of Oz, another story about a ragtag group on a colorful quest.
“When it first came out, it did well, but it wasn’t like a big, big blockbuster. And then people were watching it on VCR and things like that. It wasn’t really something I was so aware of—its impact and that people were holding on to it and people kept watching it—really, until pretty recently, when they started inviting us to come to Goonies reunions and things like that. It was something we hoped for, but didn’t expect it to happen now.”
In early 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Green was part of a virtual Goonies reunion that raised money for charity. Joining her was the whole cast—Astin, Feldman, Brolin, Ke Huy Quan, Jeff Cohen, Martha Plimpton, Davi and fellow New Jerseyan Joe Pantoliano as well as Donner, Columbus, Spielberg and Cyndi Lauper (music director for the film’s soundtrack, she sang “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.”) The event lit up YouTube with millions of views, seizing on a nostalgic hankering for bike-riding till the streetlights come on during an unstable time. Actors returned months later for a virtual script reading.
“So many movies are about someone with an amazing skill or an unbelievable talent,” Green says. “And here we are, just a bunch of dorks who get to go on this amazing journey and all kind of come together and help each other through it. So I think a lot of people find a lot of comfort in that.” Something else helps the longevity of the film: “It’s still funny.”
“Now, as a pretty old adult, I look back and I am so sentimental about it and so grateful for it. When you’re a kid and you’re going through things, even though it was so crazy, there wasn’t really an awareness of how special this was going to be 40 years later, and how many people are going to embrace the characters, embrace the story. People come up to me and say, ‘When we were kids, we would play Goonies in the backyard’ … Because I have the eyes—not just my experience, but then people who’ve watched the movie, or people who’ve grown up with me—it really does change and it really does make it more and more special and more and more sentimental, I would say, as I’ve gotten older.”
Talk of a sequel surfaced not long after the first movie. Donner fielded many pitches, including one from Astin and Feldman. “He was just waiting for the right story and unfortunately we lost him,” Green says. After Donner died, news broke last year that Potsy Ponciroli (Old Henry, Motor City) was writing a script for Warner Bros. and that Spielberg and Columbus (Gremlins) were officially on board as producers. “I was so excited, but that was over a year ago now and I haven’t heard anything since, so I’m starting to wonder,” Green says. “But fingers crossed.”
Ke Huy Quan, who played gadget whiz Data, won an Oscar in 2023 for Everything Everywhere All at Once (Cohen, who played Chunk, is an entertainment lawyer who worked on Quan’s deal to be in that film). Columbus, the original Goonies screenwriter, was with Green and the cast at Quan’s February 2025 hand and footprint ceremony at TCL Chinese Theatre. He gave an update on the sequel.
“He was telling us about it and he was giving us some details about the characters and things like that. And at that point, we were like ‘oh my gosh, this is really happening,’” Green says. “Now we’re a full year and a month later, and I have not heard anything more. I hope it happens. I just hope it happens soon.”
