Molly Ringwald Says Being John Hughes’ Muse as a Teen Was ’Peculiar’

Molly Ringwald reflected on being a muse for late writer-director John Hughes in his 1980s comedies while she was a teenager.

“It’s peculiar,” Ringwald, 57, admitted to long-time friend Monica Lewinsky during the Tuesday, March 11 episode of the “Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky” podcast.

Ringwald became an icon of the 1980s thanks in large part to her work with Hughes, who cast her as romantic leads in 1984’s Sixteen Candles, 195’s The Breakfast Club and 1986’s Pretty in Pink.

In her latest interview, Ringwald delved into the complexities of Hughes — who died in 2009 at age 59 — writing Sixteen Candles for her based solely off seeing her headshot when she was only 15 years old.

“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,” she recalled.

Ringwald added that despite her age disparity with Hughes, who was in his 30s at the time, she actually had “done more movies” than the filmmaker before Sixteen Candles because she worked as a child actress.

“Sixteen Candles was his directorial debut,” she noted. “I had done a few movies … I had actually had more experience but 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 [that I was Hughes’s muse]. Now, it does.”

Ringwald hedged slightly when Lewinsky, 51, asked if she felt her working relationship with Hughes was “weird [or] creepy,” before answering with a laugh: “It’s peculiar. It’s complimentary. I always felt it was incredibly complimentary.”

“Looking back on it, there is something a little peculiar,” she continued.

Lewinsky asked what it was like for Ringwald to reexamine her relationship with Hughes as an adult, since it all started with the filmmaker “staring” at her teenage head shot.

“It’s complex. It’s definitely complex,” Ringwald acknowledged. “It’s something that I turn over in my head a lot and try to figure out, how that all affected me. I feel like I’m still processing all of that and I probably will until the day I die.”

Ringwald previously examined the complexities of working with Hughes in a 2018 essay for The New Yorker, where she discussed the power-imbalance in their relationship.

“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 at the time. “He was also a phenomenal grudge-keeper, 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.”

In her new podcast interview, Ringwald looked back on what it meant to be internationally famous as a teenager, telling Lewinsky that it may have been easier for her than most since she’d had “varying degrees of fame” as a child.

“I’ve been a performer since I was 3. Literally, since I was 3 years old on stage,” she pointed out.

Since Ringwald acted in community theater from such a young age, she often felt like a “celebrity” to the people who came to watch her perform.

“I was written about. It was a sort of fame, a degree of fame,” she remembered. “Then, everything I did, I sort of became a little bit more well-known. You move to Los Angeles and, of course, nobody knew who I was until I started to do [movies].”

She went on: “I feel like I’ve never known a world where I haven’t been a little famous … At a certain point, then I became really, really famous. I feel like, when you’re on the cover of Time magazine … when it gets to that point, it becomes a level of fame that I don’t personally feel that comfortable with.”

Ringwald was initially “happy” with the projects she was making as a teen superstar, but slowly began to feel “all the fame and notoriety” was “really overwhelming and scary.”

“[The fame] changed me a bit,” she said. “Maybe this is just who I am but there’s a part of it where I felt like I became very closed and very self-protective.”

In recent years, Ringwald has publicly grappled with the legacy of her films with Hughes, which have been criticized for outdated depictions of sexism and racism.

The ’80s icon told Andy Cohen in a 2021 interview that, while rewatching her classic films with daughter Mathilda, it was important to put them in the context of the time in which they were made.

“I feel like that’s what makes the movies really wonderful, and it’s also something I wanted to go on record talking about — the elements that I find troubling and that I want to change for the future,” she argued. “But that doesn’t mean at all that I want them to be erased. I’m proud of those movies, and I have a lot of affection for them. They’re so much a part of me.”

“Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky” releases new episodes Tuesdays on Wondery.