Here’s What Happened To The Mighty Ducks

Elden Henson was a big kid, and that helped him rise to fame. He played Fulton Reed in the The Mighty Ducks, and then another put-upon giant in the similarly named The Mighty in 1998. And he just went up and up from there. As an adult he played Pollux in the Hunger Games franchise and Foggy Nelson in the hit Daredevil series.

Henson was one of the cast members who came back for the reunion, but The Mighty Ducks was a big part of his adult life before then too. He told TV Guide magazine in 2015, “I feel like I owe a lot of my career to being in those movies. What's funny is I still, more than anything, get recognized for The Mighty Ducks.”

Marguerite Moreau played Connie, whose last name was Moreau too! Marguerite told Time magazine in 2014 that her agent actually told her to lie to get the Ducks part, and tell the producers she was 13 rather than 14. She didn’t think for a moment she would get the role… but she did.

Moreau told Time that as soon as filming wrapped on the first Mighty Ducks “there was a collective feeling of having made something really special, and we were so excited to see it.” She went on to have a successful acting career; she has been in hits including Wet Hot American Summer and Grey’s Anatomy.

Matt Doherty played Averman, the snarky kid with the glasses, throughout the whole movie series. He also kept busy shooting So I Married an Axe Murderer in the break between films one and two. After that, he went to college, but he continued to act all the same. And he’s another one who’s returned for the 2021 reboot. 

Doherty will probably always be associated with The Mighty Ducks first and foremost, but he’s okay with that. He told radio station Kare 11 News in 2020, “I play beer league hockey on Wednesday nights, and, like, probably the only reason I’m on the team is because I’m a Duck.” Awww.

Hans was based on a real person, believe it or not. He was a grumpy old man the movie writers knew when they were kids, a skate shop owner who wasn’t much help to his child customers. The Hans played by Joss Ackland in the movie seems like more of a mentor figure.

After losing his wife Rosemary to motor neurone disease in 2002 Ackland understandably more or less retreated from the spotlight. He still occasionally does acting and directing work for the stage, though, and during the pandemic in 2020 the then-92-year-old joined his native Britain’s #ReadALetter campaign along with other U.K. actors.

After child actor Brandon Adams played Jesse Hall in The Mighty Ducks, plenty of roles came in for him. He appeared in hit TV shows including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Boy Meets World. Puzzlingly, though, he didn’t reprise his role as Jesse in the third and final Mighty Ducks movie.

Unfortunately, Adams hasn’t appeared in the 2021 Mighty Ducks reboot, though maybe he will in the future? He does seem happy to chat about his childhood experiences as Jesse after all, and he’s met up with fellow cast members for reunions before. But in the meantime, he’s working on a career in rap music.

Tammy was one of two girls on the original Mighty Ducks team, a figure skater whose skills ended up coming in useful. But as with many child actors, she decided not to continue on in that career once she grew older. Her only other role beyond The Mighty Ducks was as an uncredited extra in Jingle All The Way.

Instead, Plank embarked on a music career and became a singer and composer. She’s clearly still proud of having been in an iconic movie as a child though. On her official Twitter account, she states in her bio, “Fun fact: I was a childhood actress in the Disney movie Mighty Ducks, Tammy Duncan the figure skater.”

Danny Tamberelli only appeared in the first Mighty Ducks movie, but his short run initially did his career little harm, it seems, because he became a star outside that particular franchise. He’s not only noted for playing Tommy Duncan, but also for being one of the Petes of Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete & Pete.

Tamberelli has had hits beyond that, too — he was the voice of Arnold on The Magic School Bus and from 1997 to 2000 he was on All That. But he gradually stopped acting as he got older, and now he’s a podcaster… and, thanks to The Mighty Ducks, a hockey fan.

The son of Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez was also a member of the acting “Brat Pack” so he was the ideal choice to play the movie’s main adult character Gordon Bombay. The year The Mighty Ducks came out he got married to fellow celebrity Paula Abdul, but they were divorced within the space of two years.

Estevez was almost completely absent from the third Ducks movie, as he was off filming The War at Home, but he did happily return for the 2021 reboot. When the project was announced in 2020 he declared in a statement, “Once a Duck, always a Duck! And after 25 years, I am delighted to lace up my skates, put on Coach Bombay’s jacket and return to play the iconic character for this new chapter in The Mighty Ducks franchise.”

The Mighty Ducks kick-started Joshua Jackson’s career, and it’s still going strong to this day. After playing main character Charlie Conway, he was cast in the show Dawson’s Creek, and that made him a TV icon and teen idol for millions. After that, he had hit after hit, including Fringe.

In fact, Jackson is so busy with his career he was one of the few original kids who didn’t return for the 2021 reboot. At the time it was being filmed he was playing the lead role in Peacock’s Dr. Death, plus he’d just had a baby with actress Jodie Turner-Smith. But Charlie still might come back in the future perhaps!

Actress Kathryn Erbe joined the cast in the first Mighty Ducks sequel. She’d only done a few other screen acting jobs previously, most notably playing Patricia Reece in the TV show Chicken Soup. But portraying Michele, the hockey team’s tutor and Gordon Bombay’s romantic interest, helped give her career a boost.

In 2001 Erbe bagged the role of Alex Eames on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and she stayed on the show for eight years. Now she’s a very recognizable face on American TV. She’s been in, among many other things, The Good Fight, The Blacklist, and How to Get Away with Murder.

Aaron Schwartz was another one who told a small fib to get his role. He informed the Man Cave Chronicles podcast in 2018, “I don’t think they had me audition for Karp… I remember showing up and they asked me if I knew how to ice-skate. Of course I said yes, but I had no clue!”

That little lie led to some very big things: nowadays Schwartz is a well-established actor. He was a recurring character in the smash-hit TV show Gossip Girl and its web series spinoff, plus he’s even popped up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe via Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. And… he’s aged well, to put it mildly.

Seeing as Estevez couldn’t return for the third Mighty Ducks movie, Jeffrey Nordling took over as a new coach character, Ted Orion. He almost lost the role to another actor though, as he explained to Time in 2014. He explained, “I believe Jimmy Sheridan was already cast, and apparently had a mishap and he had to back out.”

He went on, “I think he was doing the hockey training and took a pretty bad fall. And then I came in about two weeks before shooting and did a crash course, for lack of a better word, in skating and off we went.” Nordling’s career blossomed from there: you may have seen him in Desperate Housewives or Big Little Lies.

Actor Lane Smith played Coach Reilly, the bad guy of the first Mighty Ducks movie. He was in several critically acclaimed movies both before and after that role, including The Final Days, My Cousin Vinny, and Red Dawn. He also was beloved to Superman fans as Daily Planet Editor Perry White in Lois & Clark.

Sadly though, Smith was diagnosed with the neuromuscular condition ALS in later life, and in 2005 it claimed his life at the age of just 69. He left behind a wife, Debbie, a son, and a stepson. But his performance in The Mighty Ducks is still fondly remembered by fans.

The actress behind star player Julie “The Cat” Gaffney was Colombe Jacobsen-Derstine, and she had six weeks of tutoring from Grant Mulvey of the Chicago Blackhawks before taking to the ice with the cameras rolling. She reprised her role in the third Mighty Ducks movie, but before too long she switched careers. 

Jacobsen-Derstine is a chef now! She was a contestant on The Next Food Network Star in 2007, and she has her own blog where she shares her thoughts on food and nutrition. She explained her new life to Sports Illustrated magazine in 2016 saying, “Sometimes being an actor can feel like playing the lottery. In cooking, you can put effort in and really see the results.”

Aaron Lohr, fresh off of Disney’s Newsies, joined the Mighty Ducks team as Dean Porter for both the sequel movies. He did a bit of acting in the years that followed — and he married musical star Idina Menzel in 2017 — but his main job now is being clinical director for the addiction treatment center Avalon Malibu.

Lohr’s important job keeps him busy, so don’t expect him in the reboot anytime soon. Executive producer Steven Brill told Entertainment Weekly magazine in 2021, “We couldn’t reunite the Bash Brothers because Aaron Lohr actually works as a therapist and he couldn’t leave his patients and clients for a month to come up.”

Justin Wong played Olympic skater Ken Wu in the second and third Mighty Ducks movies. He decided afterwards that being a child actor wasn’t for him, though. In 2021 he told the website Popternative that his success was “kind of hard to handle. You don’t know [what] to do with it, other than you just don’t want it to happen anymore.”

Still, Wong didn’t leave acting behind forever, as it turned out. Though he embarked on a career as a sound engineer, he returned to the Mighty Ducks franchise for the reboot in 2021. He told Popternative, “I just hope the fans are happy to see us,” and surely they were.

Nowadays, you know the name Kenan Thompson, but you might still be surprised to spot him as a child actor in the first Mighty Ducks sequel! He played Russ Tyler, the kid who invented the “knucklepunk.” Just a few years after the movie he was highly in demand as one of the stars of Kenan & Kel.

These days, Thompson is one of the biggest names in comedy and the longest-running star of Saturday Night Live. He had a little mini-Mighty Ducks reunion with Tamberelli and Vincent Larusso in 2019, and he says he’d like to be in the reboot show if it gets a second season.

Vincent Larusso almost didn’t get the role of Adam. Originally the plan was for a different actor to play the role of Hawk kid who ends up fighting with the good guys, but that actor — no-one’s ever named him — was sent home for bullying other kids. Larusso was given the part instead.

Larusso more or less stopped acting after the Mighty Ducks films and went to the Boston University School of Management. He’s apparently now the Director of Food and Beverage for the Ambassador Theatre Group… but in 2020, it was announced he was one of the actors returning for the Mighty Ducks reboot.

Shaun Weiss played one of the most memorable kids on the team, Greg Goldberg. And for a while it looked like he’d go on to have a successful acting career — he was in Freaks and Geeks and The King of Queens among other things. Unfortunately as he got older he started having lots of brushes with the law.

The actor has been arrested twice now, plus there have been assault allegations made against him by an ex-girlfriend. Though he hasn’t been in any further trouble since 2020, definitely don’t expect to see him on the Mighty Ducks reboot show anytime soon. Reportedly, there are no plans to hire him back.

Jussie Smollett, one of the famous Smollett acting family, played Jesse’s brother Terry Hall in the first Mighty Ducks movie. That’s not what he’s most known for anymore, though. As an adult he became a star with the smash-hit Fox show Empire, but then things took a truly bizarre twist.

In 2019 Smollett claimed he had been the victim of a hate crime, but then doubt was cast on his story. In 2020 he was indicted on charges of making false reports and was dropped from Empire. It remains to be seen how the case will pan out, but Smollett’s probably not going to appear as Terry again.

It’s always fun to see what cast members have been up to since starring in an epic movie — especially child stars. And if we were to get you to think of a cult that revolves around kids, what would you say? Surely, The Goonies would spring to mind. This movie came out seven years before The Mighty Ducks, so those kids must look very different now. Let’s take a look...

The Goonies’ intrepid Mikey was, in fact, Sean Astin’s first big-screen role. Of course, he’s gone on to even bigger successes since then – a little trilogy called The Lord of the Rings, for example – but he still thinks fondly of his breakout film and is totally up for a sequel.

After the massive success of The Lord of the Rings, the work has continued to roll in for Astin. He’s appeared in big TV shows like 24 and Monk, and has even diversified into voiceover roles; it’s him you have to thank for giving Raphael his voice in Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Jeff Cohen played the memorable Chunk, the kid who made the “Truffle Shuffle” the scourge of all playgrounds back in the ’80s. And let’s just say that he underwent perhaps the biggest physical transformation out of all of the Goonies clan…

In the years since, he’s lost some weight, lost some hair and now looks like a totally different person. And even though Cohen’s since left acting behind and become an entertainment lawyer, he’s not totally averse to reminiscing about the role for which he’s best known. He will also, possibly, do the Truffle Shuffle for you if he’s very drunk and you ask nicely.

Jonathan Ke Quan’s Goonies role wasn’t the only prestigious part he had taken on by that time. Fans in the know, in fact, will no doubt remember the child star fondly from playing Short Round in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Still, adventuring with Indy didn’t see him use as cool a set of gadgets as Data did.

While filming Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, nevertheless, Quan picked up some handy martial arts techniques: ones that he may have put to good use in his behind-the-scenes fight choreography work of recent years. He also shows up at sci-fi conventions every now and again.

Josh Brolin grew up in an acting family, so it was perhaps inevitable that he’d make it to Hollywood someday. Still, Brolin didn’t actually start performing until high school – and, in fact, The Goonies provided his first ever screen role. It certainly wasn’t his last, of course…

Certainly, Brolin has ended up possibly having the most successful career out of all The Goonies’ stars. His illustrious resume includes turns in the celebrated likes of No Country for Old Men, Inherent Vice and Milk – the last of which he received an Oscar nomination for.

As cheerleader Andy Carmichael, Kerri Green was one of the two female Goonies members. The movie was also her first showing on screen and could very well have been the start of a long and memorable film career; after a few years, though, Green made a different decision about her future.

By the ’90s, in fact, Green had left Hollywood for academia, going to Vassar for art studies. She still acts from time to time, though – most recently in the rather under-the-radar indie movie Complacent, which was released in 2012.

Martha Plimpton was a pre-teen model before turning to acting, but it was her role as Stef in The Goonies that really made her name. Before long, she was appearing in bigger and bigger films, and even began dating River Phoenix.

And just like Josh Brolin, Plimpton’s career has gone from strength to strength ever since, taking in one Emmy nomination and no fewer than three Tony Awards nods. She’s currently appearing as one of the leads in new ABC sitcom The Real O’Neals.

Steve Antin played mean rich-kid jock Troy Perkins to perfection in The Goonies – not that he even saw how well he had done at the time. In fact, as Antin told TMZ in 2011, to that date he’d still never seen the movie all the way through.

After a slew of movie and TV roles – including a turn in hard-hitting Jodie Foster drama The Accused, Antin has since turned to the other side of the camera. He directed 2010’s Burlesque, starring Cher – and, frankly, we don’t blame him if he didn’t end up watching all of that film, either…

Corey Feldman was apparently pushed into acting by his parents. Well, we assume they had something to do with it, as he started working in the industry at the tender age of three. But it wasn’t until his teen years that Feldman really made a name for himself with the hits Gremlins, Stand by Me and The Goonies. And, crucially, it was his work in that last film that led to his casting in an absolute classic: The Lost Boys.

But like so many child stars before him, Feldman found that the plum roles dried up as he got older. Now, he mostly acts in low-budget movies and appears on reality television. In 2013, moreover, he released his first book of memoirs, replete with some rather ugly stories about the darker side of Hollywood.