Molly Ringwald wasn’t exempt from facing Hollywood predators during her time as a teenage actress in the 1980s.
The Sixteen Candles star, famously known as a member of the Brat Pack, was the latest guest on podcast WTF with Marc Maron, where at the 51:30-minute mark of the episode, she admitted to not feeling “part of a community” as a young actress.
“I was in Hollywood, just because I was so young, really, and basically kind of a shy, introverted person. I wasn’t into kind of like going out to clubs,” said Ringwald, 56. “I feel like I’m a little–I’m more social now than I was then, but I was just too young. And it was awkward.”
“Well, you’re lucky you didn’t get taken advantage of or got into some sort of horrible situation,” Marc Maron, 60, falsely guessed.
“Oh, I was taken advantage of. I didn’t—you can’t be a young actress in Hollywood and not have predators around,” Ringwald continued.
“But I wasn’t raped by Harvey Weinstein. So I’m grateful for that,” she added before mentioning her 2017 New Yorker essay “All the Other Harvey Weinsteins.” In the piece, Ringwald detailed having to sue Weinstein over percentage rights for their early films, but shared that she wasn’t sexually harassed by him.
Ringwald revealed to Maron that she’d been in “questionable situations” with older media executives as a teen. “But I do have an incredible survival instinct and a pretty big super-ego, and kind of managed to sort of figure out a way to protect myself,” she said.
“But yeah, it can be harrowing,” she added. “And I have a 20-year-old daughter [Adele] now who is going into the same profession, even though I did everything I could convince to her to do something else.”
In 2018, Ringwald reflected on Sixteen Candles in an interview with NPR, where she admitted that some scenes were bothersome to her.
“I do see it differently. I mean, there were parts of that film that bothered me then. Although everybody likes to say that I had, you know, [writer/director] John Hughes’ ear and he did listen to me in a lot of ways, I wasn’t the filmmaker. And, you know, sometimes I would tell him, ‘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,” she said on the show. “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.”
