FLASHBACK: Molly Ringwald Was Worried She Wasn't Pretty Enough for 'The Breakfast Club'

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It's hard to believe but it's been 30 years since we spent Saturday detention with a princess, a criminal, a basket case, a jock and a brain.


The Breakfast Club
first premiered in theaters in 1985 and ET was on the set of the John Hughes flick, years before it became the American teen classic it is today.

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The film, about five high schoolers gathered on Saturday for a detention session, starred Judd Nelson (John Bender), Emilio Estevez (Andrew Clark), Anthony Michael Hall (Brian Johnson), Ally Sheedy (Allison Reynolds), and Molly Ringwald (Claire Standish), who admitted to ET in 1984 that she didn't feel right for the part of the princess because she was so different from her.

"Am I pretty enough to do this [role]?" Ringwald said. "That was my biggest worry and I'm not what you would call the conventional beauty, at least I don't feel that way. But you know I'm unique and I think it was much more interesting that [Claire] was played that way."

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Ringwald first hit it big in writer-director John Hughes' other teen drama Sixteen Candles (1984), and went on to star in Pretty in Pink (1986), his follow-up to The Breakfast Club.

Hughes passed away at 59 in August 2009 and is responsible for a long list of classic films such as Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Uncle Buck (1989) and Home Alone (1990). Like most of the films in his treasured catalog, The Breakfast Club was Hughes at his finest: an authentic coming of age film that encapsulated adolescence in the 80s.

“[In high school] you have to find your niche, and people will put you in one if you don’t find one yourself,” Hughes explained at the time. “This is about finding those things, breaking out of them and realizing that they’re really superficial.”

"In the beginning of the film you're presented with all these stereotypes and as the film progresses they invovle into something much more," Michael Hall offered. "As a group we evolve into something much more."

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Judd Nelson applauded The Breakfast Club for being based in reality as majority of the action takes place in a high school library. "High school wasn't really filled with car chases, and tremendous exciting and daring events,” Nelson said. “It was mostly people relating or not relating with each other."

At its core is was a story about communication and the connections in our lives. "It's really about people communicating," Estevez said. "Now in the age where everyone has their Walkman’s on and they're cutting people off, I think it’s a good time now for this film because it’s really about people coming together and communicating."

While technology has certainly changed since the 1980s, it's a universal message that in many ways still applies today--making the film as important now as it was 30 years ago.


Follow Denny on Twitter: @DDirecto
.