Although The Breakfast Club has cemented itself as a staple of ’80s cinema, one of its stars is once again bringing attention to one bit in the film that hasn’t aged too well.
While speaking with the U.K.’s The Times, Molly Ringwald, who played “princess” Claire Standish in the John Hughes film, shared that she had recently watched the movie, highlighting that she “only rewatched” the film because her eldest daughter, Mathilda, “wanted to see it with [her],” per Deadline.
“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,” she said. “I’m glad we’re able to look at that and say things are truly different now.”
Ringwald recently aired a similar grievance about the film during a Feb. 6 appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, when she brought up the important “conversations” she had after watching the film with her twins Adele and Roman, noting “what they took issue with and what they didn’t.”
“Like, the fact that I was basically, my character, was sexually harassed through the whole thing and then I go for him at the end. They did not get that at all,” she recalled. “I was really happy that they didn’t like that — that that was not a turn-on for my daughter.”
She also delved into the film’s problematic themes in “What About The Breakfast Club?,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2018. In the piece, she discusses showing her daughter the film when she was 10 years old, and reflected on the experience of watching these scenes back in the context of the #MeToo movement.
The film’s ensemble cast was rounded out by Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall, and Emilio Estevez, all of whom play high school students from different cliques stuck in detention on a Saturday.
The Breakfast Club marked the second of Ringwald’s collaborations with Hughes. She also worked with the director on Sixteen Candles (1984) and Pretty in Pink (1986). Despite her modern-day struggles with the film, she still noted that “they were all really fun movies to make” in her interview with The Times.
The Breakfast Club is streaming on Max.
