Yahoo Lifestyle Here’s A Full Breakdown Of Molly Ringwald’s Disturbing Experience Of Being An ‘80s Child Star After She Admitted It Was “Peculiar” To Be Director John Hughes’s Muse As A Minor
This article mentions sexual assault.
Back in the ‘80s, there was little more synonymous in pop culture than director John Hughes and teen actor Molly Ringwald, with Molly the star of three of John’s biggest movies: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink. Molly was just 15 years old when she filmed the first of the trio in 1984, and suffice to say, aspects of all of them did not age well.
Aaron Rapoport / Getty Images, Ron Galella, Ltd. / Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
In 2018, Molly actually publicly called out the “inappropriate” nature of the films in an article for the New Yorker, where she wrote of Sixteen Candles: “Back then, I was only vaguely aware of how inappropriate much of John’s writing was, given my limited experience and what was considered normal at the time.”
“I’m a little embarrassed to say that it took even longer for me to fully comprehend the scene late in Sixteen Candles, when the dreamboat, Jake, essentially trades his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, to the Geek, to satisfy the latter’s sexual urges, in return for Samantha’s underwear,” she went on.
“The Geek takes Polaroids with Caroline to have proof of his conquest; when she wakes up in the morning with someone she doesn’t know, he asks her if she ‘enjoyed it.’ (Neither of them seems to remember much.) Caroline shakes her head in wonderment and says, ‘You know, I have this weird feeling I did,'" Molly continued.
“She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought, because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t,” the star added, before asking: “How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it?”
And in a recent appearance on the Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky podcast, Molly, now 57, has reflected some more on this movie — namely, the fact that then-34-year-old John wrote Sixteen Candles specifically for her after seeing her headshot, with Molly now admitting that it was “peculiar” for her to be a grown man’s muse at just 15.
Discussing how the movie came about, Molly said that she’d already starred in the 1982 movie Tempest by this point, and had taken some new headshots for her agency. She said of John: “He wrote [Sixteen Candles] just based on the headshot.”
“He put [the headshot] up on his bulletin board above his computer station, and he wrote this movie,” she went on. “So, when it came time to cast it, they said: ‘Who do you want?’ He said: ‘The girl that I wrote this about.’”
Monica then asked Molly if she was aware of this at the time, and Molly said: “In terms of: ‘Did I know that I was a muse?’ I mean, he told me that story but, y’know, I had nothing really to compare it to. I was still only 15 years old, so I didn’t have a lot of life experience. It didn’t seem that strange to me… I mean, now it does.”
The host pressed if Molly meant “strange” in a “complimentary” way, or in a “weird” and “creepy” way, to which Molly laughed before diplomatically replying: “Yeah, it’s peculiar.”
“It’s complimentary,” she quickly added. “It always felt incredibly complimentary. But, yeah. Looking back on it, there is something a little peculiar.”
Molly insisted that she didn’t want to “disparage” John, who died in 2009 at 59 years old, in any way, and acknowledged: “It’s complex, 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 — and I feel like I’m still processing all of that, and I probably will until the day I die.”
Later in the interview, Molly admitted that she struggled with being famous at such a young age as she recalled a disturbing incident with the paparazzi when she was just a teenager. The star explained that she’d had “varying degrees of fame” for her entire life, as she used to perform on stage with her dad when she was 3 years old.
"I've never known a world where I haven't been a little famous,” she began. “At a certain point, I became really, really famous. When you're on the cover of Time magazine, I think when it gets to that point, then it becomes a level of fame that I, personally, don't feel that comfortable with. Even though I was happy with the movies that I was doing and I loved the work of actually doing it, but all the fame and the notoriety outside of that, I found it really overwhelming and scary.”
"It changed me a bit,” Molly confessed. “Maybe this is just who I am, but there was a part of it where I became very closed and very self-protective in a way that a lot of people misinterpreted — people thought that I was aloof or stuck up, and it wasn't, it was fear and being very self-protective. This was when I was a teenager, when I started to make the John Hughes movies.”
Asked if there was a specific turning point for her, Molly recalled: “I was chased by the paparazzi and they trapped me in a revolving door in a hotel. The flashes kept going off, and you know how disorientating the flashes are, but then I was also in a revolving door that just kept turning and turning and turning. That was terrifying for me.”
“Still to this day, when I go to a red carpet event or something, and there's the flash, my heart starts to race,” she shared. “And I get scared. I've done it enough now, nothing bad is gonna happen. It's just people taking my picture, but there was just something really frightening for me at that age because I was still, like, a baby."
After completing work on Sixteen Candles, John cast Molly and her costar Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club, which was released the following year. While this is widely regarded as one of the most iconic films of the ‘80s, it also has some problematic aspects that Molly addressed in her 2018 essay after watching the movie with her then-10-year-old daughter Mathilda in 2018.
Molly was 16 when she played so-called “princess” Claire in The Breakfast Club, the most popular and beautiful girl in school. Throughout the movie, Claire is relentlessly teased and harassed by John Bender, played by Judd Nelson, who detests everything Claire represents. Despite this, Claire kisses him at the end of the film.
And in her New Yorker piece, Molly called out Bender’s behavior and the example that it set, writing: “Bender sexually harasses Claire throughout the film. When he’s not sexualizing her, he takes out his rage on her with vicious contempt, calling her ‘pathetic,’ mocking her as ‘Queenie.’ It’s rejection that inspires his vitriol.”
“He never apologizes for any of it, but, nevertheless, he gets the girl in the end,” she added, also recalling that her mom was upset with a scene where Bender looks up Claire’s skirt and seemingly touches her inappropriately without her consent.
Referencing the fact that a body double was used for the upskirt shot of Claire’s underwear, Molly wrote: “They couldn’t even ask me to do it — I don’t think it was permitted by law to ask a minor — but even having another person pretend to be me was embarrassing to me and upsetting to my mother, and she said so. That scene stayed, though.”
Molly previously said that her experience as a child star prevented her from letting Mathilda follow the same path, despite her desperately wanting to.
She told the Times: “She fought us on that — she’s still kind of mad about it, but it was the right decision. I don’t think that professional acting is a great way for kids to grow up. It’s way too stressful, and it’s a crap shoot on whether or not the kids can make it through.”
And Molly reflected on her complex feelings toward her experiences as a teen actor during her recent podcast appearance, where she said: “I wouldn’t have the career I have if it wasn’t for those movies, and I feel like I have a lot of privilege being in those. I don’t want to come across as corny; I’m very conscious that people [are] dealing with much bigger issues than me, but it’s still a lot to grapple with.”
Monica then mentioned Molly’s 2017 New Yorker article “All The Other Harvey Weinsteins,” which was written in response to the #MeToo movement. In the article, Molly said that she only worked with disgraced movie producer Harvey once, at 20 years old, but was “lucky” as she believes that, at the time, she “was the one with more power” because Harvey was yet to reach the level of acclaim that he eventually became renowned for.
However, this does not mean that Molly got away unscathed, and she added: “I have had plenty of Harveys of my own over the years, enough to feel a sickening shock of recognition. When I was thirteen, a fifty-year-old crew member told me that he would teach me to dance, and then proceeded to push against me with an erection."
"When I was fourteen, a married film director stuck his tongue in my mouth on set," she went on. "At a time when I was trying to figure out what it meant to become a sexually viable young woman, at every turn some older guy tried to help speed up the process. And all this went on despite my having very protective parents who did their best to shield me. I shudder to think of what would have happened had I not had them.”
In another disturbing experience from her 20s, Molly said that during an audition, a director asked the lead actor to put a dog collar around her neck — despite nothing of the sort being mentioned in the script that she’d been given, or making sense in the context of the story. Molly wrote: “I sobbed in the parking lot and, when I got home and called my agent to tell him what happened, he laughed and said: ‘Well, I guess that’s one for the memoirs…’ I fired him and moved to Paris not long after.”
Speaking to Monica, Molly said: “I’ve had many Harvey experiences with different people at a young age, and I’m still processing. I’ve processed it in a private way, and eventually, I’m going to be able to talk about it and write about it. I’m still grappling.”
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.
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