Breakfast Club star Molly Ringwald, 56, says she was ‘taken advantage of by predators’ as a young actress in Hollywood

Molly Ringwald, who started her career as a child actress in sitcoms, revealed that she was “taken advantage of” in the early days of her career.

While they appear on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, the actress, 56, insisted she was ‘too young’ for Hollywood fame and claimed every young star on the film scene has to deal with ‘predators’ around them.

“I never really felt like I was part of a community when I was in Hollywood, just because I was so young,” the former teen idol said. ‘I didn’t feel like going to clubs. I feel like I’m more social now than I was then. I was just too young.’

Maron, 60, responded, “Well, you’re lucky you weren’t taken advantage of or put in some horrible situation.”

“Oh, I was taken advantage of,” the mother of three said, laughing. “You can’t be a young actress in Hollywood without predators around.”

The Pretty In Pink star – who got her start in the late 1970s starring in a national production of Annie but has now forged a secondary career as a translator – revealed she had “definitely been in some questionable situations” during the height of her fame and tried ‘so hard’ to steer her daughter in a direction other than show business.

Molly – who has 20-year-old Mathilda with husband Panio Gianopoulos – said she relied on her “incredible survival instincts” and “big super ego to think of ways to protect herself.”

Still, she said growing up in the spotlight “can be harrowing.”

‘And I now have a twenty-year-old daughter in the same profession, even though I did everything I could to convince her to do something else. And it’s hard.’

Earlier this year, Molly claimed that certain elements of The Breakfast Club – which follows a group of five teenagers in detention – had ‘not aged well’ since its release in 1985.

She told The Times, “There’s a lot I really like about the movie, but there are elements that haven’t aged well, like Judd Nelson’s character, John Bender, who essentially sexually harasses my character. I’m glad we can look at that and say that things are really different now.’

In April 2018, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Ringwald called out her film Sixteen Candles for a scene in which Michael Schoeffling’s character, Jake Ryan, plays with the idea of ​​taking advantage of his passed out girlfriend.

“I have Caroline in the bedroom right now, unconscious,” the character says. “I could violate her in ten different ways if I wanted to.”

While appearing on WTF with the Marc Maron podcast, the 56-year-old actress insisted that she was “too young” for Hollywood fame and claimed that every young star on the movie scene has to deal with “predators” around them ( depicted in her 1985 hit film The Breakfast Club)

“I never really felt like I was part of a community when I was in Hollywood, just because I was so young,” the former teen idol said. ‘I didn’t feel like going to clubs. I feel like I’m more social now than I was then. I was just too young’ (featured in Sixteen Candles)

“If attitudes toward female subjugation are systemic, and I believe they are, it stands to reason that the art we consume and sanction plays a role in reinforcing those same attitudes,” she wrote. ‘

She continued, “I made three films with John Hughes; When they came out, they had enough cultural impact to land me on the cover of Time Magazine and have Hughes hailed as a genius. His critical reputation has only grown since he passed away in 2009, at the age of fifty-nine.’

Despite admitting that there is “still so much” she likes about his work, Ringwald said that when one of her daughters suggested they watch The Breakfast Club together, she “hesitated.”

The actress said she was “worried that she might find certain aspects of it disturbing” but did not “expect that it would ultimately be the most disturbing for herself.”

This included recalling that they had hired an “adult woman to shoot” her character “Claire’s underwear.”

Additionally, the star revealed that her mother had shut down a “creepy” joke at the time, in which her character’s father would ask “what the hell happened to your underpants?”