Following coverage of the #MeToo movement’s response to Harvey Weinstein and other Hollywood sexual harassment scandals, the 50-year-old actress has spoken out on her 1985 hit.
Writing in The New Yorker, the former teen star has reevaluated The Breakfast Club, which was written and directed by John Hughes.
The filmmaker, who died in 2009, helmed a number of 1980s comedy hits from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Weird Science to Sixteen Candles.
However Ringwald, who acted in a number of his movies, feels much of his work was “inappropriate.”
Ringwald wrote how she felt when her 10-year-old daughter asked to watch The Breakfast Club.
She penned: “I worried she would find aspects of it troubling.
“But I hadn’t anticipated that it would ultimately be most troubling to me.”
In particular one scene sticks in her mind when a fellow student in detention appears to touch her without consent.
Ringwald continued: “At one point in the film the bad-boy character, John Bender, ducks under the table where my character, Claire, is sitting, to hide from a teacher.
“While there, he takes the opportunity to peek under Claire’s skirt and, though the audience doesn’t see, it is implied that he touches her inappropriately.”
She added: “[As a teenage I was only] “vaguely aware of how inappropriate much of John’s writing was.”
“It’s hard for me to understand how John was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot.”
Hughes died in 2009, aged just 59-years-old, following a severe heart attack.
Following his death Ringwald said: “I was stunned and incredibly sad to hear about the death of John Hughes.
“He was and will always be such an important part of my life.”
