Actress Molly Ringwald, who famously played in several of director John Hughes’s coming-of-age “brat pack” movies in the 1980s, said those films were “really, really, very white.”
“Those movies, the movies that I am so well known for, they were very much of the time. And if you were to remake that now, I think it would have to be much more diverse. And it would have to be, you know, you couldn’t make a movie that white. Those movies are really, really, very white,” Ringwald said at the Miami Film Festival while she was accepting Variety’s Creative Vanguard Award.
“And they don’t really represent what it is to be a teenager in a school in America today, I don’t think,” she added.
The 56-year-old actress began her career on the sitcoms Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life before her movie debut in the drama Tempest (1982). Her acting career has steadily continued, but none of her films has reached the height of fame as when she starred as an angsty teenager in Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986).
“I think they were really great and of that time, but they were his experience — John Hughes’s experience,” Ringwald said, acknowledging that the films reflected the director’s teenage experience of growing up in Northbrook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
Ringwald received some blowback on social media from Hughes fans.
“For years now, Ringwald has been crapping all over John Hughes — who was probably the most pro-American filmmaker since Capra — even though her own modest reputation exists in his artistic shadow. I’m over it,” journalist Mark Hemingway wrote on social media.
“Nothing worse than seeing a Gen X icon acting like a Zoomer. It’s so ‘cringe’ as the kids would say,” one social media user said of Ringwald’s comments.
Another person chimed in, “These movies also focused more on class issues & tension between being rich vs working class than on racial ones.”
“How about we not remake these movies and instead come up with new movies that reflect today’s society?” another social media user said.
It is not the first time Ringwald has been critical of her most famous films.
In 2018, she discussed the #MeToo movement and her experience working on The Breakfast Club in an essay in the New Yorker.
“I can see now, 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,'” she wrote.
She then blasted the movie: “If attitudes toward female subjugation are systemic, and I believe that they are, it stands to reason that the art we consume and sanction plays some part in reinforcing those same attitudes.”
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“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 was well into my thirties before I stopped considering verbally abusive men more interesting than the nice ones,” she added.
Hughes had a thriving career as a director and writer from the mid-’80s through the ’90s and died in 2009 at 59.
