Molly Ringwald has never shied away from bluntly reassessing the 1980s teen rom-coms that made her a Hollywood legend.

Ringwald’s work with filmmaker John Hughes defined an entire era of moviemaking in the ’80s, even if their collaborations on Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink each contain problematic elements. The actress has publicly grappled in recent years with how those movies dismissed concerns about consent and racial insensitivity as well her own misgivings about being Hughes’ romantic muse as a teenager.

Keep scrolling for a look back at Ringwald’s reflections on the movies that made her a 1980s teen idol:

‘Sixteen Candles’

Ringwald was only 15 years old when Hughes personally selected her, based on her publicity photo, to star in 1984’s Sixteen Candles as Samantha Baker, a high schooler with a crush on older heartthrob Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling).

During a March 2025 appearance on Monica Lewinsky’s podcast “Reclaiming,” the actress touched on the complexities of Hughes writing an entire romantic comedy based on a 15-year-old’s headshot.

“Sixteen Candles was his directorial debut,” she mentioned. “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.”

One of Sixteen Candles’ most problematic scenes involved a trade between Jake and The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall), in which Jake offered up his drunk girlfriend, Haviland (Caroline Mulford), for the night in exchange for Samantha’s underwear. The Geek and Haviland wake up the next morning in bed together, drawing contemporary and modern criticism that the sequence made light of date rape.

Ringwald wrote about this scene in a 2018 New Yorker essay in light of the #MeToo movement, in which she broached Sixteen Candles’ blassé treatment of consent with her costar Mulford 30 years after the film’s release.

“Thinking about that scene, I became curious how the actress who played Caroline, Haviland Morris, felt about the character she portrayed,” Ringwald wrote. “So I sent her an email. We hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since she was 23 and I was 15. We met for coffee, and after we had filled each other in on all the intervening years, I asked her about it. Haviland, I was surprised to learn, does not have the same issues with the scene as I do.”

She continued, “In her mind, Caroline bears some responsibility for what happens, because of how drunk she gets at the party. ‘I’m not saying that it’s OK to then be raped or to have nonconsensual sex,’ Haviland clarified. ‘But . . . that’s not a one-way street. Here’s a girl who gets herself so bombed that she doesn’t even know what’s going on.’”

Ringwald took an opposing view, explaining, “Haviland, like me, has children, and so I decided to frame the question hypothetically, mother to mother, to see if it changed her point of view. If one of our kids had too much to drink, and something like that happened to one of them, would she say, ‘It’s on you, because you drank too much?’ She shook her head: ‘No. Absolutely, positively, it stays in your pants until invited by someone who is willing and consensually able to invite you to remove it.’ Still, she added, ‘I’m not going to black-and-white it. It isn’t a one-way street.’”

Another one of Sixteen Candles’ frequently criticized elements is its depiction of the character Long Duk Dong, a Chinese exchange student played by Gedde Watanabe. The racially-insensitive portrayal of an Asian character was controversial even at the time of Sixteen Candles’ release, with a contemporary review in The New York Times calling Long Duk Dong “unfunny” and “potentially offensive” to Asian people. Ringwald pulled no punches in her 2017 New Yorker retrospective when she referred to Long Duk Dong as “a grotesque stereotype.”

Decades after the 1984 movie’s release, Ringwald showed Sixteen Candles to her now-21-year-old daughter, Mathilda — she also shares fraternal twin daughters Adele and Roman with husband Panio Gianopolous — and came away with a complex view of the project.

“I do see it differently,” she told NPR in 2018. “I mean, there were parts of that film that bothered me then. Although everybody likes to say that I had, you know, John Hughes’ ear and he did listen to me in a lot of ways, I wasn’t the filmmaker.”

She continued, “Sometimes I would tell [John], ‘Well, I think that this is kind of tacky’ or ‘I think that this is irrelevant’ or ‘this doesn’t ring true,’ and sometimes he would listen to me but in other cases he didn’t. And, you know, you don’t want to speak up too much. You don’t want to cross the line. Or at least that’s the way that I felt at the time.”

While Ringwald publicly shared her problems with Sixteen Candles and several of her 1980s movies, she told Andy Cohen in 2021 that they shouldn’t be erased from history simply because of their problematic elements.

“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 insisted. “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.”

‘The Breakfast Club’

Ringwald continued working with Hughes, and Sixteen Candles costar Hall, on 1985’s The Breakfast Club. The coming-of-age comedy takes place entirely at Shermer High’s Saturday detention, where popular girl Claire Standish (Ringwald) slowly opens up to a group of misfit students about the facade of her high school status.

One objectionable scene involves loner John Bender (Judd Nelson) ducking under Claire’s desk to avoid detection. The film alludes to Bender touching Claire inappropriately while he’s hiding but doesn’t dwell on the moment.

In an essay for The New Yorker in 2018, Ringwald wrote, “I kept thinking about that scene. I thought about it again this past fall, after a number of women came forward with sexual-assault accusations against the producer Harvey Weinstein, and the #MeToo movement gathered steam. 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.”

Ringwald noted that Hughes, who died from a heart attack at 59 in 2009, was “hailed as a genius” for his 1980s movies, though his legacy may, in fact, be much more complicated.

“That two of Hughes’s films had female protagonists in the lead roles and examined these young women’s feelings about the fairly ordinary things that were happening to them, while also managing to have instant cred that translated into success at the box office, was an anomaly that has never really been replicated,” she acknowledged.

However, Ringwald returned again to Bender’s treatment of Claire in The Breakfast Club to argue that some of Hughes’ work was now out of step with modern sensibilities.

“I can see now, Bender sexually harasses Claire throughout the film,” she wrote in 2018. “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. Claire acts dismissively toward him, and, in a pivotal scene near the end, she predicts that at school on Monday morning, even though the group has bonded, things will return, socially, to the status quo. ‘Just bury your head in the sand and wait for your f**kin’ prom!’ Bender yells. He never apologizes for any of it, but, nevertheless, he gets the girl in the end.”

The actress admitted her reassessment of The Breakfast Club may seem “overly critical” to some, but her views were based on significant reflection.

Ringwald took some other light-hearted jabs at The Breakfast Club over the years. At a 40th anniversary cast reunion in April 2025, Ringwald took issue with a climactic scene where Claire made over moody goth student Allison (Ally Sheedy) so she was more conventionally attractive to their jock classmate Andrew (Emilio Estevez).

“I just want to say that I am not responsible for the makeover,” Ringwald told the crowd at C2E2. “And I was really not happy.”

According to Entertainment Weekly, Ringwald stressed that she was particularly opposed to Claire stipping away all of Allison’s personal style.

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“I thought that it would’ve been better just to strip off all of the makeup and just have Ally’s face fresh-scrubbed because it’s so beautiful,” she argued. “I didn’t like the way that they did her hair at the end … I was not responsible.”

During The Breakfast Club’s 40th anniversary reunion, Ringwald suggested that a remake or reboot of the ’80s classic wouldn’t work today, People reported.

“I personally don’t believe in remaking that movie, because I think this movie is very much of its time,” Ringwald insisted. “It resonates with people today. I believe in making movies that are inspired by other movies but build on it and represent what’s going on today. This is very, you know, it’s very white, this movie. You don’t see a lot of different ethnicities. We don’t talk about gender. None of that. And I feel like that really doesn’t represent our world today.”

‘Pretty in Pink’

The star’s third collaboration with Hughes was for 1986’s Pretty in Pink, which revolved around high school senior Andie Walsh’s (Ringwald) love triangle with the suave Blane McDonnagh (Andrew McCarthy) and geeky best friend Duckie Dale (Jon Cryer).

One of the more infamous behind-the-scenes stories about the making of Pretty in Pink is that director Howard Deutch shot a scrapped ending where Andie chose Duckie over Blane. Test audiences hated the Andie-Duckie ending so much that a new climax was hastily written and shot.

Much of the modern debate around Pretty in Pink deals with Duckie’s sexuality. Speaking to Out Magazine in 2012, Ringwald lent credence to a fan theory that Duckie may have been coming to terms with his sexuality throughout the movie.

“Duckie doesn’t know he’s gay. I think he loves Andie in the way that [my gay best friend] always loved me,” she said. “That ending fell so flat — it bombed at all the screenings. I didn’t realize it then — I just knew that my character shouldn’t end up with him, because we didn’t have that sort of chemistry. If Jon was here now, and I could talk to him, I think that he would completely acknowledge that.”

Cryer disagreed with Ringwald’s interpretation of Duckie, telling Zap2It in 2012 his costar was basing her assessment on a real person who partially inspired the character.

“[Molly] said that the guy whom Duckie was based on was gay. It’s a different thing. Let’s be clear here,” Cryer said. “No, she actually said that if one projected beyond the movie, that Duckie would be out by now. And I respectfully disagree.”

Duckie’s casting is another hot-button topic. Ringwald admitted to Vanity Fair in 2021 that she had unsuccessfully lobbied Hughes to cast her friend Robert Downey Jr. as Duckie, instead of Cryer.

“I had wanted Robert for the role. I think John wanted either Anthony or Michael J. Fox, who was gonna do it at one point but had to drop out because he got Back to the Future,” she revealed. “It would’ve made for a completely different movie had any of them played Duckie. But once Jon [Cryer] stepped into that role, there was no question that he was the guy. He put so much of himself into that role that it’s impossible to imagine anybody else.”

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There have also been rumors of on-set tension surrounding Pretty in Pink. Director Deutch alleged in 2020 that Ringwald and McCarthy grew to hate each other on set because she harbored an unrequited crush on her costar. Ringwald offered a more nuanced explanation in 2021 about her off-screen dynamic with McCarthy.

“I was only 17, and Andrew was already in his 20s, so we were definitely living very different lives,” Ringwald clarified to Vanity Fair. “But we got along fine and ended up doing another movie together a few years later. I feel like we had an interesting dynamic because we definitely were not a couple, and we weren’t really friends either, but we had a lot of chemistry.”

Another element of Pretty in Pink that Ringwald has routinely criticized is the triangular pink prom dress designed by Marilyn Vance. While Andie’s grown became the definitive prom attire for the 1980s, Ringwald was never a fan of Vance’s design choices.

“[I’d want] pretty much anything but what I wore,” she told Good Morning America in 2024. “Anything would have been better. Marilyn Vance did the dress, the very ’80s sort of inverted triangle. It was not what I had imagined. I was not very happy with it and I really did want to change it, but now that I look back on it, it was very much of its time.”