Molly Ringwald looks back on ‘peculiar’ relationship with John Hughes as a teen: ‘Still processing that’
Molly Ringwald has a new perspective about her relationship with late director John Hughes.
The 57-year-old actress appeared on Monica Lewinsky’s podcast “Reclaiming” Tuesday and reflected on being cast in Hughes’ 1980 comedies “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink” as a teenager.
“In terms of, did I know that I was a ‘muse,’ he told me that but when you’re that age, I had nothing really to compare it to,” Ringwald said.
Ringwald said that while “Sixteen Candles” was Hughes’ directorial debut, she already had experience doing movies.
“But I was still only 15 years old so I didn’t have a lot of life experience,” she noted. “It didn’t seem that strange to me [being Hughes’s muse]. Now, it does.”
“Like strange, still complimentary or strange weird, strange creepy?” Lewinsky, 51, asked.
“Umm, yeah, it’s peculiar,” Ringwald said. “It’s complimentary. It’s always felt incredibly complimentary, but yeah, looking back on it, there was something peculiar.”
Ringwald also addressed how Hughes — who was in his 30s when he worked with the actress — wrote “Sixteen Candles” solely after seeing Ringwald’s headshot when she was 15.
“It’s complex,” the “Riverdale” alum said. “It’s definitely complex and it’s something that I turn over in my head a lot and try to figure out how that all affected me.”
Ringwald added, “I feel like I’m still processing all of that and I probably will until the day I die.”
Hughes famously directed some of the biggest comedy films in the 1980s and 1990s, most of which featured the Brat Pack members.
The filmmaker died in 2009 at age 59.
At the time, Ringwald said in a New York Times op-ed that she hadn’t spoken to Hughes for more than 20 years before his death.
Ringwald later wrote a 2018 essay for The New Yorker in which she looked back on the power imbalance in her relationship with Hughes.
“John believed in me, and in my gifts as an actress, more than anyone else I’ve known, and he was the first person to tell me that I had to write and direct one day,” she wrote.
“He was also a phenomenal grudge-keeper,” Ringwald added, “and he could respond to perceived rejection in much the same way the character of Bender did in ‘The Breakfast Club.’ But I’m not thinking about the man right now but of the films that he left behind. Films that I am proud of in so many ways.”
Ringwald also called out the sexism, racism and homophobia present in Hughes’ movies, which she realized after she rewatched “The Breakfast Club” with her daughter.
“How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose?” Ringwald wrote. “What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it? Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art — change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past.”
