Please Rewind Talent Wall

Corey Feldman

Corey Feldman’s screen career began unusually early, with a McDonald’s commercial at age three, followed by an extensive run of television appearances and advertising work. Born in the Reseda neighborhood of Los Angeles on July 16, 1971, Feldman grew up on camera, appearing in series including Mork & Mindy, Eight Is Enough, One Day at a Time and Cheers before becoming one of the most recognisable young actors of the 1980s. That recognition came through a remarkable sequence of genre favourites. Feldman appeared in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Gremlins and The Goonies, then played the volatile Teddy Duchamp in Stand by Me. In The Lost Boys, he brought a straight-faced, comic-book intensity to vampire hunter Edgar Frog—a role he later reprised in Lost Boys: The Tribe and Lost Boys: The Thirst. The film also began his onscreen partnership with Corey Haim. Billed together as “The Two Coreys,” they went on to make License to Drive and Dream a Little Dream, among other projects. Feldman’s particular screen presence suited stories in which childhood adventure bumped against something stranger or darker. He could play broad comedy without losing the nervous edge underneath it, a quality that connected family entertainment, horror and coming-of-age drama across his best-known work. He also became part of another enduring screen property as the voice of Donatello in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, later returning for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III. His career subsequently moved between film, television, voice acting, stage work, reality programming and music. Feldman released his first album, Love Left, in 1992 and has continued performing and recording. He and Haim reunited for the A&E reality series The Two Coreys, for which Feldman also served as an executive producer. In 2013, he published the memoir Coreyography. Interest in Feldman’s less widely seen work has continued too. In 2023, director Jordan Peele programmed screenings of Feldman’s 2005 film The Birthday at Film at Lincoln Center, giving another curious corner of his long, unconventional career a fresh look.