Cast your mind back to somewhere in the mid-eighties, and let me throw a few words at you. The Breakfast Club. Pretty in Pink. Sixteen Candles. John Hughes. Molly. Molly Ringwald. Molly Ringwald was the teen queen who defined what it was to be a Reaganite adolescent; the girl who ran with the Brat Pack and for a brief moment was the coolest chick on the planet. Then, as suddenly as she rose to fame, her blip disappeared off the radar. So what happened?

“I don’t really believe in regret,” she said when Grok spoke to her from New York. “I think you can always learn from the past, but I wouldn’t want a different life. I think that everybody experiences anger during their life. Usually it happens during your teen years, but my teen years were so focussed on work, I was too busy and I really didn’t have time to experience that.

“So I did it later, in my early twenties, and it was really good, because I believe that anger propels you in interesting directions. And my anger propelled me out of Hollywood and into a different place, and that’s what I needed to do at the time.”
Ringwald is soon to appear in Cut, a new Australian horror film of the Scream variety, directed by one-time Hoodoo Guru Kimble Rendall.

“I was offered the movie, blindly, I just received a script and a proposal and everything, and I thought it was really funny. It was an interesting project and I was very curious to come and film in Australia,” she said.

In the film, Ringwald plays a once-famous teen movie star who is now reduced to working on student films and television. Ironic, yes?

“It reminded me a bit of Scream, but with a lot more humour. It’s very tongue in cheek, which I like about it. The character’s a great character for me. I thought she was really fun and outrageous, she’s like the comic relief of the movie. It was a great experience.

“Kimble was a first-time director but I’ve worked with a lot of first-time directors, I always find that they’re kind of interesting in a way because they’re all full of ideas and they have a lot to prove. They’re not jaded. John Hughes, when I first worked with him, that was his directorial debut, so I’ve had a good track record with first time directors.”

Another first-time director that Ringwald has worked with is renowned New York photographer Cindy Sherman, on the oddly schlocky horror/satire Office Killer:

“That’s the only other horror movie that I’ve done,” she laughs. “She was very specific about the look of the movie, because obviously that’s where her expertise lies, she was a little bit green about performance, scripts and all that sort of stuff.

“I remember when I was doing a scene with Jeanne Tripplehorn where the characters had this little cat-fight, and so we were ad-libbing and doing all this stuff, and Cindy was delighted, clapping her hands together and saying ‘Oh my God! You were improvising! You were improvising!’

Some might say that Ringwald has suffered the most horrible fate an actor can sufferoher first films were too successful. Forever, she will be frozen in pop culture as John Hughes’ queen of the screen. However, she still has a lot of love for those films, and is unsurprised by the constant calls for a Breakfast Club sequel.

“I really like those movies, and I’m really proud of them,” she said. “I don’t think there ever will be a Breakfast Clubreunion or that there should be. I’m kind of amazed, and sort of flattered and happy, that those movies have had the shelf life that they have—they still have an impact. That means that they were kind of special, they weren’t just these movies that come and go and nobody really cares about them later.

“All I can really do is do my work. I don’t really notice myself in a lot of ‘Where Are They Now?’ things, at least in America, because I’m working all the time, so I have mercifully escaped that, but I’m always associated with the Brat Pack. Particularly with the fifteenth anniversary of The Breakfast Club, there was a lot of discussion. But I’m also 31 years old, which is when most people are just starting their careers.”
When she began to grow out of high-school films, Ringwald found it hard to find decent roles that were suited to her, and eventually ended up running away from Hollywood, finding a home, a new life and a husband in Paris.

“I went there to work on a movie and I just fell in love with Paris. I was at a time in my life when it seemed like the thing to do. There wouldn’t really be another time to do a thing like that. Later I’d be married and have a family, it was the perfect time to get away and experience life out of the public eye. It wasn’t planned, it just sort of happened, I followed my instincts and it was the best thing I ever did.”

After spending several years in France, even working with Jean-Luc Godard at one stage, Ringwald eventually ended up back in America. One of her first projects was the failed sitcom Townies, which recently aired in Australia to little acclaim during non-ratings season. In fact, it only lasted half a season in total before being axed.
“It was an interesting experience,” she said. “There were things I liked about it, and things I didn’t like. It was interesting, there were good things in it.

“I liked the cast a lot,” she continued, obviously searching for something good to say about the show. “It did pretty well actually, unfortunately we were at a time when the head of ABC was changing and somebody new was coming in and she didn’t really want to work on shows that she didn’t develop herself, so because we were a new show, we hadn’t had the time to establish ourselves, but actually our ratings were quite high.”

In the opening scene of Cut, Molly can be heard belting out a Split Enz number at the top of her voice. Apparently, she’s quite the fan of antipodean rock.

“In the eighties, I had friends who were in a band,” she explained. “Their day job was working as messengers at A&M records, which was the studio which distributed all of the Australian bands, and they used to swipe the LPs and give them to me. That’s why I knew all of these really obscure Australian bands like Hunters & Collectors and the Hoodoo Gurus and had heard them before anybody else did. And I was a really big fan of Split Enz, but I guess they don’t really count as Australian.”

A little known fact about Ringwald is that before becoming a famous actor, she actually released several recordings with her jazz musician father, which may explain a rather strange ambition:

“I’d love to do a musical. I was really little the last time I did any singing, so I don’t
know if that counts, but I would like to do something, because I haven’t really done that in a while.”

And while Molly is limbering up for a new singing career, she finds herself working with a new generation of teen stars who grew up with her films and now star opposite her, such as Katie Holmes in Teaching Mrs Tingle.

“Katie actually interviewed me for Interview magazine, which was really fun,” she said. “It’s nice. I like that I’ve influenced them in a good way. I love Katie and Claire Danes and all these young up-and-coming actresses because they’re all so sweet. Every time they meet me they’re like ‘Oh my God, I love Sixteen Candles’ and it makes me feel like I’ve contributed something. I don’t know what exactly, but it’s flattering.”