The Oscar winner calls the late pop icon an ‘honorary Goonie.’

Ke Huy Quan recalls Michael Jackson visiting the set of The Goonies

The Oscar winner calls the late pop icon an ‘honorary Goonie.’

By Derek Lawrence

Derek Lawrence

Derek Lawrence is a former associate editor at **. He left EW in 2022.

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September 15, 2026 2:00 p.m. ET

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Ke Huy Quan; Michael Jackson. Credit:

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty; Michael Jackson

- Ke Huy Quan is reflecting on the time when Michael Jackson visited the set of *The Goonies*.

- The Oscar winner shared the story in his new memoir.

- Quan says that the “energy felt different” when Jackson arrived.

For one day, Michael Jackson was an “honorary Goonie.”

In his new memoir, *Never Say Die*, Ke Huy Quan fondly looks back on the day that the late pop icon visited the set of the 1985 classic *The Goonies*.

“One day the energy felt different,” the Oscar winner recalls. “Seeing this Michael Jackson in person was something else entirely. It felt like someone had opened a door to another universe and he’d just walked through it by mistake. When he stepped farther into the caves, he looked around almost shyly, taking everything in. That surprised me most, the gentleness. The soft voice. The way he seemed just as curious about our world as we were about his.”

Quan continues, “And then all of us Goonies swarmed him at once, talking over each other, trying to get closer, asking questions nobody could hear the answers to. For a few minutes, it honestly felt like Michael Jackson had become an honorary Goonie, just hanging out on set to see what we were up to.”

Corey Feldman, Ke Huy Quan, Martha Plimpton, Kerri Green, and Josh Brolin in ‘The Goonies’.

Warner Bros. / courtesy Everett Collection

Directed by Richard Donner, *The Goonies* followed a group of children whose attempt to save their homes from foreclosure leads them to discover an old treasure map. The journey soon finds them searching for a long-lost treasure and evading a family of criminals also hot on its trail.

Quan was 14 years old during production of *The Goonies*, starring alongside Sean Astin, Corey Feldman, Jeff Cohen, Martha Plimpton, Kerri Green, and Josh Brolin.

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Feldman and Jackson became close friends during the ‘80s, and Feldman was a longtime Jackson defender as the singer faced mounting accusations of sexual abuse against minors, all of which he denied. But Feldman changed his tune following the release of *Leaving Neverland*, HBO’s 2019 documentary that detailed the stories of two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who allege that the singer sexually abused them as children.

“I cannot in good consciousness defend anyone who’s being accused of such horrendous crimes,” said Feldman, a victim of sexual abuse himself. “At the same time, I’m also not here to judge him because he did not do those things to me and that was not my experience.”

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In 2024, Feldman told ** that he’d “rather stay away” from talking about the allegations against Jackson, calling it a “giant trapdoor for me.”

“I wasn’t there. I didn’t experience it,” he said. “The times that I had with Michael were incredible. And unfortunately, it seems like some people had other experiences, and I can’t go into reflecting on something that I wasn’t there for. It doesn’t really behoove me to get into that topic other than to say I support all real victims of sexual assault.”

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