Don’t you forget about her.
Molly Ringwald is speaking out about a controversial scene in “The Breakfast Club.”
The Brat Pack actress, 57, reunited with the movie’s stars – Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez – for the “Don’t You Forget About Me: The Breakfast Club 40th Anniversary Reunion” at the C2E2 pop culture convention in Chicago on Saturday.
Onstage, Ringwald spoke about Allison (Sheedy’s) infamous makeover scene towards the end of the 1985 classic, which has long polarized audiences.
“I just want to say that I am not responsible for the makeover,” Ringwald, 57, quipped. “And I was really not happy.”
In the scene, the goth “basket case” Allison gets a makeover from the popular girl Claire (Ringwald), giving her a preppy look instead.
This makes the jock, Andrew (Estevez), notice Allison more since she now conforms to the popular crowd look.
It’s an odd moment, since the movie is about teens from different cliques getting to know each other in detention, learning that there’s more to them than what’s on the surface. The movie’s themes include the danger of conformity, since each teen has struggled with conforming to their respective clique or surface image.
Fans have taken to social media in the past to express outrage with the scene.
“Watching The Breakfast Club and no matter how many times I watch it, I still get mad at this ‘makeover,’” one complained on X, formerly Twitter.
“The breakfast club was wild for giving allison a makeover that made her 10x less pretty than when she started,” another fan said.
Apparently, Ringwald agrees.
“I thought that it would’ve been better just to strip off all of the makeup and just have Ally’s face fresh-scrubbed because it’s so beautiful,” she said at the event.
“I didn’t like the way that they did her hair at the end… I was not responsible.”
Sheedy, 62, meanwhile, told Elle in 2015: “I don’t know if John [Huges] wrote that, or it was a studio thing that they wanted Allison to go from being very plain to being suddenly very glamorous. I didn’t like that.”
“I had come up with this thing about her black eye makeup and very pale skin so I thought, ‘Could it be more that she’s taking this mask off?’ John did give me that and they didn’t really put a whole bunch of makeup on me; it was more about revealing who Allison is,” she continued. “I wish it had been a little more of that and a little less of, ‘Let’s make her pretty.’”
Nelson, 65, however, defended the moment.
“Those people don’t understand, it’s explained in the scene. ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘Because you’re letting me,’” he said on Saturday, quoting the movie.
“That’s why.”
