Whatever Happened To Andrew Shue?

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https://www.looper.com/1309613/whate...d-andrew-shue/

BY SAM KENCH/JUNE 12, 2023 4:15 PM EST

For a brief time, Andrew Shue was one of the biggest stars on primetime television. These days, we feel like we haven't seen or heard from him in many years. More so than most actors, Shue's stardom was almost entirely pinned on a single role. He burst into the public consciousness in 1992 as one of the stars of "Melrose Place," a spinoff of the popular "Beverly Hills, 90210." Shue played the role of Billy Campbell across all seven seasons of the show, appearing in nearly 200 episodes throughout the '90s.

When "Melrose Place" came to a close, Shue dropped off the map. Despite being a hot commodity and a recognizable face with plenty of star power, his acting career didn't really extend beyond this one popular role, but why? Let's sift through the details to find the real reasons why Shue left acting and the entertainment industry behind at the height of his stardom.

He stopped acting with his big sister

For as big of a star as Andrew Shue was at his zenith, his older sibling has always been even more famous. His real-life sister is Elisabeth Shue, the BAFTA and Oscar-nominated star of "Leaving Las Vegas" and many other popular films and shows. Elisabeth became an A-lister in the '80s with hits like "The Karate Kid," "Cocktail," and the "Back to the Future" sequels. Unlike her brother, Elisabeth remains active in the entertainment industry to this day with recent roles on hit shows like "The Boys" and she made a return to the world of "The Karate Kid" by reprising her original role on "Cobra Kai."

Conversely, Andrew was never all that interested in acting as a profession. His career in the entertainment industry is arguably owed to his big sister, who brought him along on many of her early films and got him involved. Andrew played small, uncredited bit parts in Elisabeth's films "The Karate Kid," "Adventures in Babysitting," and "Cocktail." Outside of "Melrose Place" and his one big film role in "The Rainmaker," Andrew didn't have any substantial roles in noteworthy projects without his sister's involvement. When he stopped tagging along in Elisabeth's movies, that pretty much meant the end of his career in the entertainment industry, too.

He was labeled a soap star

Andrew Shue's best-known role by far was as Billy Campbell on the primetime soap opera "Melrose Place." When the show went off the air, Shue's acting career ground to a halt. It might be natural to assume that the star of a hit television show can jump straight into their next big project once their main show comes to an end, but that wasn't the case for Shue. Whether by choice or not, Shue stepped away from acting for almost an entire decade after the end of "Melrose Place," and his eventual return to the entertainment industry was brief before retreating back away from the spotlight.

Even though primetime soaps are generally considered to be higher general quality than daytime soap operas, they still come with a significant stigma. Some soap stars are able to springboard into bigger and better projects, but plenty don't. It is pretty common for a soap star to either fade away after they leave their big show or to spend their career moving from one soap opera to the next. Many of Shue's "Melrose Place" co-stars found their star profiles shrinking after the end of the show, but Shue was the only member of the core cast who seemingly stopped acting altogether. It's possible that Shue's status as a soap star got in the way of landing the types of roles he wanted, but it's also possible that he had simply had enough of the entertainment industry and wanted to spend his time elsewhere.

His career as a professional soccer player

In 1994, a couple of years into Shue's run on "Melrose Place," the FIFA World Cup invited him to serve as an ambassador. He jumped at the opportunity and used the connections he made there to ingratiate himself into the world of professional soccer. Even though he lacked the usual extensive training and was already older than the vast majority of pro athletes in their rookie years, Shue managed to earn himself a spot on the newly formed LA Galaxy, Los Angeles' first professional soccer team.

Shue joining the team was a bit of a PR move on the Galaxy's part — professional soccer was new to the U.S., and having a celebrity involved was good for publicity. Dan Calichman, one of Shue's teammates, described the thinking to MLS Soccer by saying, "If Andrew could get them any notoriety or get the Galaxy on Jay Leno, wonderful. Maybe there would be a slightly better chance for the league to survive." Shue did eventually bring the team on Leno's talk show and helped legitimize the sport in the United States.

He was good for the press, but that doesn't mean he couldn't legitimately compete. Shue and his whole family grew up playing soccer. He told Princeton Info, "Soccer really was our family's lifeblood. It was the thing that defined us." Before joining the LA Galaxy, Shue had found himself playing for the Bulawayo Highlanders, a Zimbabwean soccer team, back in the late '80s. He played with them in the B.A.T. Super League Championship as the only non-native teammate.

For a time, Shue split his time between "Melrose Place" and the LA Galaxy, but he continued with soccer after the show ended. He made a total of five pro soccer appearances and continues playing soccer non-professionally.

He returned home

Andrew Shue didn't just leave acting behind after the end of "Melrose Place" — he left the entirety of Hollywood in the rearview mirror. No longer tethered to Los Angeles for the production of the TV show, Shue uprooted and returned to his home state of New Jersey. He made the move with his first wife and their three children, and the family settled down in Princeton, New Jersey, for a relatively normal, private life.

The family made the move in 2003, about five years after Shue's time on "Melrose Place" came to a close. His first wife became the owner of a local floral arrangement shop, and Shue himself could be spotted supporting the Yankees at baseball games. He is also a regular player in a New Jersey men's soccer league, continuing to keep up with the sport. For a little while, it seemed like Shue's time in the public spotlight was 100% behind him, but he eventually made a brief return to acting and ended up back into the media's eye not long after his 2008 divorce from his first wife, Jennifer Hageney.

His messy second divorce

After his first divorce, Andrew Shue remarried in 2010. While his first wife was a private citizen with no involvement in the entertainment industry, his second wife was and remains deeply entrenched in the media machine. Shue married "Good Morning America" host Amy Robach in 2010, and the two were together for about 12 years before divorcing in 2022. The divorce from Hageney was mostly kept under wraps, but the divorce from Robach became a veritable media circus. The highly publicized ordeal shined an intrusive light on Shue and Robach's marriage and the scandal that led to their split.

The divorce became inevitable when it came to light that Robach had been having an affair with her "Good Morning America" co-host T.J. Holmes. Robach was also accused of coming to work drunk and of stocking alcohol in her dressing room, and Holmes was accused of having a second workplace affair with one of the producers of "Good Morning America" prior to Robach. Both Robach and Holmes ended up divorcing from their respective spouses and losing their jobs at "Good Morning America" amidst the scandal. As Robach's husband, Shue was caught up in all of the press covering the scandal and divorce, but Shue himself, for the most part, kept his head down. He distanced himself from the scandal and largely avoided commenting on it publicly while removing all mention of Robach from his social media pages and leaving the relationship behind.

His entrepreneurial side

Andrew Shue's career in the entertainment industry is mostly a thing of the past. Instead, he has kept busy over the years with a variety of activist and entrepreneurial endeavors. He was involved in the creation and founding of multiple successful businesses, which remain active and ongoing in one form or another to this day.

In 2001, Shue co-founded CafeMedia, which amongst other properties, led to the formation of companies and brands like CMI Marketing and ClubMom, the latter of which eventually spun off into the popular CafeMom brand and its interrelated sister brands like MamásLatinas. The brand is still around but has morphed from something closer to a message board and social media site into more of a traditional blog with articles about parenting and the entertainment industry. CafeMom eventually merged with AdThrive and became a part of the Raptive umbrella, which focuses on management and advertising related to online creators.

Shue also co-founded the charitable activist organization DoSomething. The group organizes and supports various philanthropic projects that run the gamut from trash collecting to voter registration drives. Interestingly, despite co-founding the group, Shue is no longer listed as a member of the team or the board, nor is he mentioned in the organization's description or about section. His involvement in DoSomething may be a thing of the past, but the organization is still active in many causes today.

His political work

One of Andrew Shue's largest projects in recent years has been his involvement in the organization known as The People. Shue co-founded the organization and remains the president of the board as of this writing. The People is a non-partisan political activist group that was founded in response to the tumultuous 2016 Presidential election.

The group purports to be strict about their non-partisan approach, however, they were founded in part by prominent conservative Frank Luntz, who was once given PolitiFact's Lie of the Year anti-award for spreading political misinformation. The People vows to only tackle non-partisan issues in a non-partisan way. Their areas of focus thus far have mainly been on subjects like gerrymandering and efforts to deter elected politicians from refusing to accurately reflect the will of their constituents.

The talking points of The People frequently revolve around the idea of "resetting" or "rebuilding" the currently accepted framework of American politics. Much of their focus is on communicating directly with average citizens to gather their opinions on pressing issues. They promote government reform efforts as a way to combat the two-party political system, which they label as broken and ineffective.

His podcast

While he was still married to Amy Robach of "Good Morning America" fame, Andrew Shue started up the podcast "Mad Life." The podcast was produced by his CafeMom brand and focused on all things parenting-related. The initial plan was for Shue and Robach to host the podcast together. Shue and Robach didn't have any children together, but both had multiple children from their previous marriages who all coalesced as one big extended family.

When Robach's schedule proved to be too busy, Shue sought co-hosts elsewhere. He didn't have to look far when he ended up enlisting Robach's mother Joanie (Shue's mother-in-law) to join him in hosting "Mad Life." The podcast became a trio with the addition of Chuck Nice, a stand-up comedian and frequent radio and television host, most notably working frequently alongside Neil deGrasse Tyson.

"Mad Life" launched in 2012 and was extremely popular for a time, attracting a large listenership that consisted primarily of parents. Around the same time, Shue and Robach also jointly created a children's book titled "Better Together!," which was based on their experiences parenting a blended family. With their marriage over, so too is the "Mad Life" podcast a thing of the past. The old episodes of the podcast seem to have been taken offline, and the show's former landing page on Shue's CafeMom website has been scrubbed clean, perhaps in response to the fractious divorce.

His last film role was the perfect one to go out on

As soon as "Melrose Place" went off the air in 1999, Andrew Shue stepped away from acting completely. He would remain almost entirely outside of the entertainment industry for the better part of a decade before returning for the 2007 film "Gracie." With his only other notable film role being Cliff Riker in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Rainmaker," "Gracie" became an instant career highlight for Shue. The role could have marked his big return to acting, but he immediately stepped back away from the industry. With the exception of a tiny, uncredited and unnamed appearance in the straight-to-video soccer movie "Goal! III," Shue has not acted again — or, at least not in a capacity that warrants an IMDb credit — in all of the years since.

"Gracie" is a sports movie about a teenage girl who helps carve a path for women in competitive soccer by playing on the all-boys team. The film proved to be the perfect role for Shue to end his acting career on for a multitude of reasons. The subject matter and the New Jersey setting are both near and dear to his heart, and "Gracie" found him acting alongside his famous older sister Elisabeth Shue for the first time in many years. In addition to acting, Andrew Shue also co-wrote and produced the movie for the first and only time in his career. The plot of the film was inspired by Andrew and Elisabeth's older brother Will Shue, who passed away at just 26 years old in an accident, which is mirrored by the accidental death of the main character's brother in the film. Elisabeth's real-life husband Davis Guggenheim co-wrote and directed the film, making "Gracie" a real family affair.

He's occasionally appeared on unscripted programming

It has been over 10 years since Andrew Shue made use of his acting talents, but that doesn't mean he has been avoiding the public spotlight altogether. Over the years, he has occasionally popped up on various unscripted television shows. In the years after "Melrose Place" ended, he has been featured as a guest on the series "The View," "The Dr. Oz Show," "The Meredith Vieira Show," and "Up Close with Carrie Keagan." Some of his appearances look back at his time in Hollywood while other appearances were used to promote his other projects. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Shue participated in a cast reunion for "Melrose Place" held over Zoom, which is the closest he has come to acting again since the 2000s.

While he was married to Amy Robach, Shue was a frequent guest on her segment of "Good Morning America." Since their divorce, these appearances have, unsurprisingly, ceased. His last television appearance to date was on an episode of the "Nick Cannon" show. Shue went on the show alongside his then-wife Amy Robach shortly before their divorce.

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What Happened To Andrew Shue?

Since essentially retiring from acting following his time on Melrose Place, Andrew Shue's career has gone in all kinds of interesting directions.