Molly Ringwald Agrees: Being John Hughes' Teen Muse Was 'Peculiar'

For anyone who grew up watching movies like Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club, having a girl-next-door teenaged heroine like Molly Ringwald felt empowering. But for the actress herself, looking back now on how she, at 15 years old, became the muse of a married 33-year-old man with two children, brings up more complicated feelings.

On Tuesday, Ringwald talked about the experience with Monica Lewinsky on her weekly podcast, Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky. She recounted how a real-life night out at a music club with Ringwald and her friends inspired Hughes to write Pretty in Pink. But even before the two had ever met, the actress unknowingly served as a muse for the up-and-coming director.

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Hughes was given Ringwald’s head shot, which he hung above his computer and used as inspiration to write Sixteen Candles. “So when it came time to cast it, [his agents] said, ‘Who do you want?’ He said, ‘The girl that I wrote this about,’” Ringwald explained.

Hughes relayed the story to Ringwald when they first met, but she said the impact of it didn’t really register. “When you’re that age, I mean, I had nothing really to compare it to… I didn’t have a lot of life experience, so it didn’t seem that strange to me.”

But time has given Ringwald, now 57, a new perspective. And she admitted to Lewinsky that while it didn’t seem odd at the time, “Now it does.”

Lewinsky pressed, asking if it felt strange in a “complimentary” way or was it “weird [and] creepy,” which elicited a laugh from Ringwald, who said: “Yeah, it’s peculiar.”

“It’s complimentary,” she added. “It always felt incredibly complimentary. But, yeah. Looking back on it, there was something a little peculiar.”

Lewinsky made it clear that she understands Hughes was a very important person in the actress’ life, and she wasn’t attempting to “disparage” him in any way. Ringwald understood, and again agreed that “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.”