Molly Ringwald: My John Hughes Films Are ‘Really, Really, Very White,’ Remakes Would Need More Diversity

Actress Molly Ringwald, who became a famed member of the “brat pack” in the 1990s through the work of director John Hughes, spent time dissing the very films that made her career as not “diverse” enough as she accepted Variety’s Creative Vanguard Award on Saturday at the Miami Film Festival on Saturday.

Ringwlad has had a long career but never again reached the height of fame she achieved in films such as Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986), all of which were penned and/or directed by John Hughes (the last was directed by Howard Deutch but written by Hughes).

In her appearance on stage to accept the award, Ringwald said that she really decided to attempt a film career after having a part in the 1982 movie, The Tempest. Before that, she appeared in two episodes of the TV series Diff’rent Strokes which resulted in a single season performing on the series The Facts of Life.

But the movie work was a different world for Ringwald. “Once I did that movie and experienced filmmaking, I realized, ‘Oh, that’s really what I want to do.’ So, I think it was John Cassavetes and Paul Mazursky who made me a film actress,” she told the audience at the award presentation on Saturday.

But she also rehashed complaints about the very movies that briefly made her a star.

Ringwald told the audience that if the Hughes trio of films were to be remade, they would have to be “more diverse” because as they are now, they don’t “represent” enough people.

“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.

“And they don’t really represent what it is to be a teenager in a school in America today, I don’t think,” she concluded.

This is far from the first time that Ringwald has attacked the movies that made her famous. During the height of the #MeToo movement, Ringwald also slammed The Breakfast Club because she said her character was “sexually harassed” in the film.

“Bender (Judd Nelson) sexually harasses Claire (Ringwald) 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 in an essay for The New Yorker in 2018.

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