Molly Ringwald was asked by podcast host Monica Lewinsky if being director John Hughes’ muse was “creepy,” prompting an intriguing response from the actor. (Watch the video below.)
The story went that Hughes plucked her headshot from a pile and posted it on the wall as inspiration while he wrote “Sixteen Candles” (1984). He later cast her in the lead role.
“Complimentary or strange weird, creepy in any way?” Lewinsky said on an episode of her “Reclaiming” show posted Tuesday.
Ringwald laughed awkwardly. “Yeah, it’s peculiar,” the actor replied. “It’s complimentary. It always felt incredibly complimentary. But yeah, looking back on it, there was something a little peculiar.”
Ringwald was 15 and Hughes was a married father of two at the time.
“It didn’t seem that strange to me,” Ringwald said. “I mean, now it does.”
While Ringwald did not suggest anything untoward ever happened, she spoke of conflicting feelings around their dynamic.
“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,” she said. “I feel like I’m still processing all of that, and I probably will until the day I die.”
Ringwald, now 57, also starred in two other iconic teen movies, “The Breakfast Club” (1985) and “Pretty in Pink” (1986), for Hughes, who died in 2009.
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Fast-forward to 9:15 for her reflections on being a muse for the filmmaker: