'The Breakfast Club' Star Thinks One Scene From the Movie 'Hasn't Aged Well'
The Breakfast Club, the beloved John Hughes 1985 teen coming-of-age movie, celebrates its 40th anniversary next year. But like many comedies from the 1980s, there are some scenes that would not fly by today's standards, as star Molly Ringwald learned during a recent rewatch of the film.
In a new interview with the Times UK (via People), the 56-year-old actress said that while she doesn't typically enjoy watching her own movies, she agreed because her 20-year-old daughter Mathilda Gianopoulos wanted to watch it together. However, she noted that one scene in particular involving her character, popular girl Claire Standish, and the delinquent rebel John Bender played by Judd Nelson, didn't exactly hold up.
"There is a lot that I really love 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," Ringwald explained. "I’m glad we’re able to look at that and say things are truly different now."
In the film, five wildly different high school students—including jock Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), outcast Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy), and nerd Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall)—are sentenced to all-day Saturday detention. But despite their differences, by the end of the day they find that they have more in common than they realized.
In addition to The Breakfast Club, Ringwald also starred in two other John Hughes films in the '80s, Sixteen Candles (also starring Hall) and Pretty in Pink.
"They were all really fun movies to make," she added to the Times. "Sixteen Candles, the first movie I made with the director John Hughes, in 1984, was filmed during the summer. He would just let the camera roll and we would improvise. It was a very free, creative experience."
Of course, The Breakfast Club is not the only Hughes film that has aspects that don't hold up today. Sixteen Candles famously features a foreign exchange student character named "Long Duk Dong" (portrayed by Gedde Watanabe) that has been criticized for playing into Asian stereotypes.
"I was making people laugh. I didn't realize how it was going to affect people," Watanabe later remarked in a 2008 NPR interview. "I was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I was accosted a couple of times by a couple of women who were just really irate and angry. They asked, 'How could you do a role like that?' But it's funny, too, because at the same time I laugh at the character. It's an odd animal."