How do you survive fame?

February 02, 2024 1h 12m

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Actor Molly Ringwald joins us to talk about a time in her life when her job was to pretend to be a normal American teenager, a job which made it impossible to actually be a normal American teenager.
How did she learn to survive? In an era when the internet has turned many more people into public figures, what can everybody else learn from her?
Plus, Sruthi Pinnamaneni tries to learn more about a rare and enchanting song.

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Transcript

I'm PJ Vote.

Welcome to Search Engine.

Each week, we try to answer a question we have about the world.

No question too big, no question too small.

This week, how do you survive fame?

We ask a person who was the most famous teenager in America, Molly Ringwald, after some ads.

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Um, can I, um, can I turn up the volume on mine?

Yeah.

Because I don't really hear myself.

Let me see which one you are.

I think you're this.

Say something?

Yeah, I think that's better.

Yeah.

No, that's good.

That's good right there.

Okay.

Cool.

Okay.

I'm going to read you an introduction.

Okay, wait.

Can you turn it down a little bit?

For breakfast, I had...

I went to Whole Foods and I got a whole box of cheese sticks.

Oh.

The like crackery ones?

I love those.

I love that.

I really love those.

The ones that are like kind of twisted.

Yes.

Yeah.

Those are so good.

I ate an entire box.

Okay.

Does that sound okay?

Yeah.

Okay.

This is my least favorite part.

It's just weird to like talk about someone while they're in a room, but that's okay.

Molly Ringwald is an American actor, a writer as well.

But she rose to fame in the 1980s playing a teenager in a series of very popular movies, 16 Candles, Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink.

She's a grown-up now and still a beloved actor.

She was in the Big Dahmer series on Netflix last year, which gave me nightmares.

One feature of fame is that it turns real living human beings into metaphors for something else in everyone's imagination.

Maybe in real life, you really are that thing.

Maybe you're not, but you become, for strangers who haven't met you, a kind of living metaphor.

Molly Ringwald in the 1980s was maybe a metaphor for the American teenager, like the person that a lot of people pictured when they thought about what a teenager was in the 1980s, or a teenage crush.

What would that do to a person?

We've been friends for a long time.

We've never talked about this.

I have always been in awe of just how well-adjusted Molly is.

Not well adjusted for a famous person, well-adjusted for a human being.

I've had friends who have had varying degrees of success on the internet, which has meant that I've watched people lose themselves to even just micro amounts of fame.

I've watched people's egos expand and collapse over doses of fame much less strong than what was being manufactured in Hollywood in the 1980s.

And the more I've seen this, the more I've wondered about Molly, who remains a paragon of normalness.

So much so that I feel a little bit weird talking to my friend about her other life, about being famous.

But I've been thinking about this stuff lately, and I wanted to know how she got to a place where her brain seems to work very well.

That's my introduction.

That's a good introduction.

I'm curious, like,

how would you introduce yourself?

Hi, PJ.

Hi.

How would I introduce myself?

I think it depends on who I'm talking to.

I usually just say I'm Molly, or I'll say I'm Matilda's mom, or Adele and Roman's mom.

Usually I'm just Molly or I'll say I'm Molly Ringwald.

I'll use my whole name and then people will be like, yeah, I know.

I know who you are.

Yeah.

Or they don't because not everyone knows who I am.

And before I even like start to ask you questions, just to check my premise,

the question I want to ask you by the end of this interview is, how do you survive fame?

Do you feel like you have survived fame?

Yeah, I think I'm out of the woods now.

I mean, now I've been famous much longer than I haven't been famous.

So I don't really even remember a time when I wasn't in the public eye.

What was your first entry point into even like acting?

Like what was the first time in your life you were in front of a camera?

The first time I was in front of a camera, I mean, I think I was like in front of a camera doing a commercial when I was little, but I started out doing theater.

So I was on the stage first.

Even my first professional job was a long musical.

I did the first West Coast production of Annie for 15 months.

She's famous.

Wish I was on the radio.

Me, too.

Nani, who wants to be on a double radio?

I do.

So, for all of the Hour of Smiles family, family, this is Berkeley Sang!

Hey, Hobbleman, hey, Dapper Dan!

You both had your style, but brother, you're never fully dressed without a smile.

How old were you?

Just aged myself there.

I was 10.

And do you remember what it felt like?

I loved it.

I mean, I really felt like I was kind of born to perform and born to entertain people.

I mean, that's what I said I wanted to do when I was little.

That's what I told everyone, that I was going to be a famous entertainer.

From when you were 10?

Oh, from like way before that.

I was on stage with my dad when I was three and a half.

Like, that's when I started.

Your dad wasn't an actor, was he?

No, he was a jazz musician.

So the world's youngest jazz singer is how I was touted.

So you were three and a half years old singing like jazz standards?

Yeah.

So did you never have an awareness of stage fright?

Evidently not.

That's so crazy.

No, but you know, I was always kind of a shy kid, considered myself an introvert.

Yeah.

The only time I didn't feel shy was when I was performing.

Why?

I don't know exactly, but it had to be like a lot of people.

It had to.

The only way I didn't feel shy is if I was performing and like you couldn't really see the people, it was like there was a light on you and like you knew the people were there, but it was like that, that to me is different.

Like if I was asked to sing for a couple people in the living room, that felt really hard to me.

So like wedding toast difficult.

Exactly.

Enormous theater, not difficult.

Exactly.

Yeah, because it's almost like you're alone, but you're not alone when there's just like a light on you.

It's just like a weird thing, but a wedding toast would keep me up at night trying to prepare for that.

Or speeches.

If I have speeches that I have to do, like by myself, that gives me anxiety.

I relate to that.

I like two of my sisters have gotten married and both times they asked me to give a speech and it was like I crammed for it.

Like it was like I was talking in front of the present.

Like it really, really stressed me.

And like also just wanting to get it right, but also talking in front of faces you can see is a very scary feeling.

Yeah.

It always that that's scary for me.

But performing is not, singing a song that somebody else wrote is not, or performing as a character.

And I don't think this is unique to me.

I think this is something that actors experience.

I think there's a lot of shy actors out there that don't feel shy.

And they're able to express something that they can't.

feel like they can express in their ordinary life.

And that's kind of part of the appeal.

And so when you were a kid acting, can you just paint me a picture of what that was like?

Like you're

10 and a production of Annie on the West Coast.

How did that fit into the rest of your life?

Well, that became my life

for 15 months.

And when you're 10 years old, 15 months is a really long time.

So that was just like, that's what you did.

I didn't go to regular school.

I went to school with all of the annie orphans during the day with a really nice teacher named Miriam who wore bell bottoms.

And then at night, I performed.

I was friends with all the girls and that was just kind of like everything.

It was my social life.

It was my school.

It was, it was, it was a job because I was paid for it.

And then I slept late, unlike other kids.

I didn't go to school until later because I had to perform late.

It was fun.

It was something that I really wanted to do.

You get to express big emotions that like everyone is telling you as a kid, like behave yourself.

don't yell don't scream settle down don't behave like that you're just told all of this stuff but when you're on stage acting you just get to like express all of the stuff that's in there in a in a really I guess pretty healthy way yeah and were you like you were describing how for you at that point school was like you're being educated with like the other orphans from Annie Were you like immediately kind of just removed from normal school life, like from like normal school kids, basically?

Yeah.

For the 15 months that I did that show, I was only going to school in the Annie schoolroom, which was in the theater.

Totally strange, but it felt completely normal because you just, you adapt when you're a kid.

Kids adapt to just about anything, whether it's good or bad.

It just was.

That's, that's what life was.

But it was really, really hard when it ended.

Basically, you aged out of Annie.

You aged out of the play.

You got to be a certain height, you know, and they measured you.

And like, you, you could only get your wardrobe like refitted so many times until you were just too tall.

You could literally like physically feel yourself growing out of the thing you wanted.

Yes.

That's so bizarre.

Yes.

But by that point, I think I'd gotten an agent and was like auditioning for things.

And fortunately for me, I left Annie and like a week later was in my first television series.

It was Different Strokes, which was a Norman Lear series in the 80s.

And then that became Facts of Life.

You in your books are what you there about what looks and what you care about.

The time is right to learn the facts of life.

That was really, really lucky.

And what your family, were they like, how invested was your family in you doing this?

Like was their feeling?

I mean, they must have been pretty invested because I wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise.

My mom was a stay-at-home mom

when we were growing up, me and my brother and my sister.

I was the last.

So then after that, she went to chef's training and got a job.

But like while I was growing up, Somebody needs to take you to auditions and take you to classes and do all that.

It's kind of like a full-time job.

Yeah.

I mean, mothering is a full-time job anyway, but she mothered.

She took care of my dad, who was blind, and then also like took me to auditions.

Morning, girls.

Here I am, the only headmaster that makes house calls.

How are you, girls?

We're women, okay, Mr.

Badley.

Sorry, Molly.

I keep forgetting.

You're a woman.

And then not too long after that, I got my first movie.

And what was that?

It was called Tempest.

And what was Tempest?

By Shakespeare?

It was a modern adaptation.

It was directed by Paul Mazurski, and it was with John Cassavetes and Jenna Rollins.

Oh, wow.

And Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia.

And yeah, it was a really big,

important movie with a lot of like really big, important actors.

How old were you?

13.

What did that feel like?

It felt amazing.

I was really excited.

I mean, I didn't know who John Cassavetes was because I was 13 years old.

So I wasn't necessarily excited about that per se, but I was really excited.

I just got along with the director really well.

He was a really great director, and he really got me.

And it was smart and it was interesting.

And then I got along so well with John Casavetes and Susan Sarandon.

All of them.

I mean, the whole experience was incredible.

And that's when I decided that I really wanted to focus on film.

Does it feel strange looking back at how comfortable you were?

I don't think I necessarily would have been that comfortable except for

the fact that Paul Mazurski was such a great director and was such a strong actor's director.

He was also an actor before and

like really just wanted the best out of me and like knew how to tap in to that.

And I was basically playing his daughter, who was kind of a little bit of a wise ass.

And so he wanted to make sure that I could bring it.

And so during the audition process, he said, tell me your life story and I'm going to like throw you a penny every time you say something dumb.

Okay.

And so I was like, okay, I'm Molly Ringwald.

I was born in Roseville, California.

And he would just like fling a coin at me.

Why is that dumb?

Because it's just like a straight fact.

No, it's not.

He was just fucking with me.

Like he was just,

he wanted to see how I would respond, But I knew that he was fucking with me.

Like it felt like a game.

It didn't feel like a test.

It felt like a game.

And so he just, like, and then he ran out of pennies and then he started to throw quarters.

And then I, and then I gathered them.

I just kept like gathering them up.

And he was like, okay, give me back my money.

And I was like, no, I'm going to, I'm going to keep it.

And it was just, he was just smart.

He was just a good director.

Yeah.

And he got me.

And other directors that I've worked with haven't.

Frozen daikiris are too sweet and they make you dizzy.

It's a principle of the thing.

I don't really want a frozen daiquiri.

I tasted one once in Emma's bars, but I'm not free to do what I want.

Mom is, you are, my mom.

We're not free.

We're just older.

You can do what you want.

I dream what I don't do.

Like what, besides quitting your job?

But my job is part of what I am.

It's not that simple, Dodo.

School sucks, but I can't quit.

It's not that simple for me either.

But this was your first experience of working on a film, and it felt like home and it felt fun and it felt like the right type of challenge.

And that was the director.

Yeah.

And it was the actors.

I mean, it was Cassavetti's, it was Jenna Rowlands.

I was working all of a sudden in this whole other caliber of quality.

I mean, to go from like a sitcom, which was just like set up, set up, joke, set up, set up, joke, set up, set up, joke.

And then suddenly I was doing this movie that had three weeks rehearsal ahead of times, which you don't even get now on practically anything.

It was really like another time of movie making where everybody was just, you know, rehearsing and then improvising and then talking about the characters.

It was just a whole other thing.

And it was so fascinating to me.

So it's like you're both doing it and you're getting an education.

Exactly.

So then what happens?

So then that movie came out and didn't really, for the budget, it wasn't really considered a success, even though it's still one of my favorite movies that I've ever done.

But then I kind of like got put on lists, like the casting director lists, this is somebody, this is a new up-and-coming person.

And is that like a formal thing or like a metaphorical thing?

I don't think it's a formal thing.

It's just kind of like, they're always like hunting for fresh blood.

So I was fresh blood.

I was 13 years old.

And at that point, I was still going to like regular school.

What was it like at regular school?

Well, it depended on the year.

Seventh grade was

great.

It was fine.

I had a group of friends.

And

then

the summer between seventh and eighth grade is when I did my first movie.

And then I came back like a month late to start school.

It was enough time for all of the clicks to have formed while I was away.

And I lost my entire friend group.

And I did have a bully.

And she, she just hated me.

She was big.

She had a Page Boy haircut, big eyes.

Name was Laverne.

I don't remember exactly what she said, except for like that she was going to like kick my ass after school.

Classic bully.

She just like would just like make fun of me and like just kind of, it seemed like I was always afraid of like turning a corner that I was going to like run into her.

Anyway, so I did my movie over the summer.

I did Tempest and then I came back and all of my friends were gone.

And then my bully befriended my best friend.

And that was just basically hell.

And that it all felt very connected to what I did, the professional thing that I was, that I had done a movie over the summer.

It was just like

the jealousy.

I mean,

middle school is hell for everyone.

Yeah.

Anything that you do that's

at all different, I think is really not looked upon kindly.

No, it's just funny because it's like, it sounds like this is your first moment of actually having to survive fame.

Like this is your first moment where this thing you like to do was causing unforeseen problems that were particularly yours and particularly difficult to know how to navigate.

Yes, absolutely.

I felt like I wanted to be a normal kid in certain ways, but I wanted to be able to do this other thing and still be a normal kid.

But then I realized that I couldn't.

Were you surprised that people were jealous of you?

Had people been jealous of you in your life before?

I mean, I had definitely gotten bullied before for something that I did.

Like, I made a record when I was six years old with my dad.

What was the record?

It was a jazz record.

It was called I Want to Be Loved by You, Molly Sings.

And the album had like a red album cover, and there was a heart, and there was like me in the heart wearing like a little gingham dress.

I wanna be loved by you, just you, and nobody else but you.

I wanna be loved by you

along.

Boop, boop, boom.

It was very, um, you know, I'm really glad that I did it now.

But when I was six or seven years old, I remember going to school.

Actually, a girl that I became really good friends with brought the album to school because she had it and wanted me to sign it for her, which I did.

But then her older brother made fun of me.

Right.

But in like a really kind of like mean way.

It's like the rules of surviving grade school are don't be different, don't be special, don't be vulnerable.

And so

recording music is different and maybe special.

And then you're doing it with your father, which is vulnerable.

And so that moment of like a kid signing the album, it's very like

risky yeah I guess the other thing I'm curious about is

when people were reacting badly to you in school

did your brain complete it do you remember as they're jealous or is that like the perspective you have as an adult

I think that's that's a perspective that I have as an adult I mean I'm sure it's something that my mom might have said to me.

And it's something that, of course, I say to my kids too.

But yeah, when you're young, it's like you don't think people are going to be jealous of you.

Like, I didn't think that I was like pretty or I didn't really think that there would be any reason for anyone to be jealous of me.

Yeah.

Of course, I look back on it now and I'm like, I was really cute.

I was adorable.

So at some point, did you have to stop being a middle schooler?

at the same time as being an actor or did you keep toggling between the things?

I left that school where I lost my whole friend group.

And if I stuck it out, it probably would have gotten better because, you know, that stuff usually, I think, calms down.

But it had already been difficult with going away and getting my homework.

Like the teachers were not very amenable.

So for a year, I went to professional children's school.

It was professional children's school.

Exactly what it sounds like.

It's for children who are professionals.

Because in my head, I was like, is it for people who are professionals at being children?

Like, that doesn't.

Oh, it's for the time you were doing.

Yeah.

who else is at professional children's school?

Jason Bateman was.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, professional child.

Yeah.

Now, professional adults.

Yeah.

We went to school together in eighth grade.

Although we never talked, I kind of would sort of sneak glances at him.

He was very cute.

Yeah, I did that for a year, but you only had to go for three hours a day.

To professional children's school.

Yeah.

I mean, it was so like not going to school.

I couldn't even handle it.

I just said, like, I feel like I'm not learning anything.

And then I went to a good school the next year, but I really

no longer had much of a social life.

I got very wary of other girls.

So there was a while that I just didn't really have many friends because I became really sort of fearful about interacting with other girls that were my age.

And did you understand that like at the time where you just like girls are scary basically or people are scary or

like did you understand that as related to what you were doing or not related?

I knew that it was related to what I was doing.

Yeah.

But that didn't mean that I wanted to stop doing what I was doing.

Yeah.

It just meant that I kind of protected myself for about a year.

I kind of like opted out of female friendships

for a good year, year and a half.

Yeah.

And then the summer after ninth grade is when I did 16 Candles.

After the break, Molly experiences an unfathomably large wave of attention and learns how to survive it.

That's after some ads.

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Welcome back to the show.

16 Candles was released in 1984.

The first of three movies from director John Hughes in which Molly starred.

Movies about high school kids having crushes and fighting with their parents.

Movies that at the time were revolutionary in part just for what they were willing to treat as important, the lives of regular American teenagers.

The Breakfast Club was the breakout hit, a movie filmed for a million dollars that would make over 50.

The movie's about a group of outcast kids who spend a day in Saturday detention together.

Molly plays Claire Standish, the popular girl who gets made fun of by the other troublemakers because she's the popular one.

Well, well,

here we are.

I want to congratulate you for being on time.

Excuse me, sir.

I think there's been a mistake.

I know it's detention, but um,

I don't think I belong in here.

It is now 7.06.

You have exactly eight hours and 54 minutes to think about why you're here.

Molly's written about these movies in an essay for The New Yorker.

She describes their enduring power and remarks on the ways that they don't entirely hold up.

You should read the article, It's Smarter Than Anything I'd Say Here.

But for our purposes today, all that matters is that these three movies made Molly into a teen idol, launched her into a kind of fame that was, is, pretty rare and confusing.

This is a scene from 16 Candles, a teen comedy about a girl named Sam whose family forgets her birthday.

Molly plays Sam.

The movie opens with her character looking at herself in the mirror, hoping that she's aged.

I decided that turning 16 would be so major that I'd wake up with an improved mental state that would show on my face.

All it shows, they don't have any sort of a tan left.

I better get downstairs.

My family's probably pissed off.

I haven't let them wish me happy birthday yet.

Did you understand that 16 Candles was going to be

a big deal?

No.

No, I did not.

I mean, I thought that it was going to be fun,

which it was.

It was really fun to do.

Why was that fun?

It was over the summer.

It was my first movie with John Hughes, and we had like hit it off.

And he was somebody who I felt like really saw something in me.

And we had a connection.

And I knew that it was just going to be a fun movie.

I didn't expect for it to necessarily be a hit or anything.

How old were you when you were shooting it?

I was 15.

And when did you understand that it was a hit?

Like, what was the moment where you understood that either it was different or your life might be different?

Well, actually 16 Candles was not, it wasn't really a big hit when it came out.

I didn't know that.

It was actually like a little bit disappointing at the box office.

But

I had done 16 Candles and then I did Breakfast Club.

John Hughes, he asked me and Anthony Michael Hall just at the end of 16 Candles to do Breakfast Club, which was funny because he was originally going to do the Breakfast Club and then he wrote um 16 candles over a weekend with my picture over his computer or his typewriter or whatever his workstation and then he sent that to the studio and they said oh we we like that one better we want to do that one first and so he said oh i want to meet the girl that's in this picture how did he have your because you were on these lists like how did he have your yeah well he he had left one agency and went to another i think he went from caa to icm or something which is where i was at the time and they gave him a bunch of pictures of their clients and I was one of them.

It's such a strange way, or maybe it's not.

I don't know how anyone normally writes a movie, but it's such a strange feeling to be like, this adult person has kind of had a dream inspired by you and now you're going to walk into that dream.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

But I was so young and didn't really have all of that much experience.

Although I did have more experience than John Hughes had at that point.

I mean, he had an advertising background.

And And then when he wrote like a lot of comedy stuff and wrote for like the National Lampoon and all of that, but like 16 Candles was his first experience as a director.

And I think the Breakfast Club was his second.

So I had done more movies than he had in that point in time.

But, you know, I was still whatever, 15 years old.

I didn't have that much experience.

So yeah, it is extraordinary.

So then

16 Candles comes out.

It's not earth-shattering.

Breakfast Club is the thing that is.

Yes.

Yeah.

Breakfast Club was a huge hit, like really big.

Which is also just funny because it's like the thing that had taken you off the path of the life of a normal American teenager was largely being filmed acting as a normal American teenager.

Yeah.

It's really funny because Hollywood really loves to put people in boxes where they think, okay, that's all you can do.

Like if you do something well

and you succeed at that thing, then that's all you can do.

And I succeeded very well at projecting this, what Pauline Kahl, a famous film critic, called charismatic normality.

What did you make of that?

Well, I didn't like it at the time because I was like, I don't want to be normal.

That sounds boring.

But charismatic is also.

Yeah, but charismatic is good.

So it's kind of seemed a little bit like a backhanded compliment, but I get what she was saying now.

And I was like, I projected this very like normal teenager, but I was so not normal as a teenager.

And my experience had never been like a normal teenager.

So I was acting in this thing that was actually kind of like foreign to me.

And then suddenly I went from

being sort of known as the shy girl who acted at school to being like the most famous teenager in America.

Do you remember when it became clear to you that that was the case?

I remember like certain things

like when all of the girls who had kind of like dumped me at school wanted to get together and go out and like

talk about what

it was like making these movies and the people that I acted with.

And it's just like this feeling that you get.

Obviously, I'm like recognized a lot more.

What did the feeling feel like?

It felt a little bit overwhelming and sometimes really embarrassing.

It's like being taken by a wave that's just like, okay,

I know how to swim, but I can't swim in this like tidal wave that's taking me away.

I don't know how to navigate that.

So I'm just going to like try to get a gulp of air when I can and just sort of like let this wave carry me where it's going to take me.

When you were talking earlier about how

it feels good to be on stage when you can't see the crowd, but you can also be a person who's shy when you can see a bunch of faces.

You're talking about,

I think, wanting to be open in places where you feel safe being open.

And I would imagine the experience of like being that young and suddenly being that famous, it means

you're always going to be on stage in a way.

Yeah.

And you're not going to have control over it.

And you're never going to feel,

I don't know, like the comfort that comes with knowing that your life has a backstage to it.

Yeah.

I was always really jealous of people that had stage names like Bono or Sting or like people that had changed their names because I felt like that way it would be really clear.

Like when I'm Bono, I'm doing that.

There would always be people that would know.

the real me and then know this other version of me, but but Molly Ringwald is my name and that's it.

And I'm always that person, but there's obviously like a Molly who's a performer and Molly who is

performing as Molly too.

Like when I'm doing interviews, now it's a little different because I know you.

But, you know, when I'm doing interviews, not to say that I'm lying, but I'm obviously like, I am a version of myself

that

I put out there.

And I don't talk about the most private.

parts of myself unless I decide that I want to for whatever reason.

I feel feel like there has to be a part of me that's just for me.

Right.

And you don't really get to do that when you have fame that's like at a certain level that's burning that bright.

It's like everybody wants everything of you all the time.

And every interaction that you have with somebody, whether it's a good day or a bad day, you have to be on all the time.

But I don't know anybody that can be on all the time.

I certainly couldn't.

And I felt like it was really

hard because anytime you like make a mistake or if you are just having like a bad day, it suddenly shapes this narrative about you.

Was that happening like where you would say the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong way or whatever, and all of a sudden it's a story?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Definitely.

And I could feel it sort of happening.

Like I was also really worried about it too.

I was like, there's no way that this can stay at this level.

There has to be a backlash.

You knew that?

Oh, yeah.

Why did you know that?

I don't know.

I just instinctively knew.

I just knew.

I mean, you also like see it too.

You see people who are built up and then torn down.

Yeah.

Like, I was smart enough to know that everything is cyclical and that there is no way that I could stay at that level.

I don't even think that I really wanted to.

So there might have been a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there as well.

But I remember exactly like when my backlash started, People Magazine had organized for me to do this story with Lillian Gish.

She was a really famous like 20s film star.

Okay.

I guess they were saying I was like the Lillian Gish of my time.

I see.

So they wanted to do this like old Hollywood, young Hollywood.

And I was really excited about it.

Like I know who she was.

I had watched silent movies, but I was in New York and I didn't have a very good sense of direction and I got lost and I couldn't find a taxi and it was in winter and I didn't have a cell phone like tried to call and then finally my publicist said it's too late just forget it just like go home and send her flowers which I did and I felt terrible about it and while this was happening I thought oh my god here is the beginning of my backlash really yeah And it was.

I mean, it was a better story for them because it was like, oh, oh, young Hollywood is so awful and doesn't care.

They're brats to the brat pack.

It was like poor Lillian Gish was there and she had baked me cookies and she was this old woman that was there feeling so sad and rejected by this brat.

It was just like, I could have written the story myself.

And that kind of like started this whole thing.

And then you get branded for like being difficult.

You know,

you're still famous.

It's just that instead of getting this warm embrace from everyone, people like start thinking that you're a brat and you're not a nice person.

It's just so funny.

I mean, it's not funny.

And I know that the experience of it wasn't funny, but as a scandal, it's so

tame.

Yes.

It's very tame.

It's like this person wasn't punctual.

This person disrespected their elders.

It feels like it's from like another different older culture.

It feels like a scandal from the 50s or something.

I know, I know.

It's so ridiculous.

But then that's like enough because it's just perception.

And by the way, can I just also

say like, oh, boohoo, poor me.

I mean, I think in terms of like problems that you could have in the world, I've led a very privileged life.

I have to acknowledge that.

I don't hear a person asking for sympathy.

I mean, at least the question I'm trying to ask you, and I think the question you're answering, it's not how hard is it to be you?

It's just like,

how did you learn to navigate a life that

the one person who they could put you in touch with who had a similar life, you were late for cookies and full of your spot in People Magazine.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

It's like everyone's going to have an opinion about you.

If everyone has an opinion about you, you can't control it.

But you have to kind of learn that.

And you were somebody who was trying to behave in like a hyper-conscientious way.

so you wouldn't fumble something and then you get lost in new york City one day,

and the world decides you're a terrible person.

If being careful hadn't made you safe,

what was the lesson you took?

Like, what did you learn from that?

What did you adjust?

Um,

I don't know.

I feel like I just kind of kept like trucking along and like doing my best.

And I felt very hyper-vigilant, yeah, um, very careful, but like to a point of where

it was just exhausting.

Like I felt exhausted, felt tired all the time because to be that vigilant when you're supposed to be like a young person just kind of like fucking up and making mistakes.

Yeah.

I didn't really have the chance to do that because I was expected to be a role model because I was like the perfect teenager.

I was like a good girl.

It was just this image that I had that, you know, I mean, aside from standing up Lillian Gish and not eating Lillian Gish's cookies that she baked for me, I felt like there were like a lot of expectations for me to like be a certain way.

Where would you, like when you were like

15, 16, 17, when you weren't getting in trouble with People Magazine, where was the place you could go where you felt like you could be like a person?

Like in the privacy of my own home.

That was the only place I think that I felt safe anywhere else.

Like if I was out somewhere, somebody could take a picture or like overhear a conversation.

I was followed in my car a couple times.

By just strangers?

Yeah.

Strangers or people like wanting pictures or photographs.

Yeah, it was kind of scary.

You were living in New York at this time.

Well, I was going back and forth between New York and L.A.

And what would it look like to just like try to have a life?

Like camera phones don't exist, but paparazzi does.

Like, did you pick your nose?

I feel like I really

was not able to have any kind of like a normal life in Los Angeles or in America at that point.

I couldn't do it, which is, I think, why I ended up moving to France.

As a way to get away from it?

Yeah.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I think that that choice to move away had a lot to do with fame.

That's That's crazy, though.

I mean, it's crazy to be, to correctly look at your life.

Most of the people who have to leave a country as big as America have done something really terrible.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Well, I didn't realize it at the time.

I just fell in love with France and fell in love with that feeling that I had there.

And what was the feeling?

That I could breathe.

Right.

Everything felt new and it felt very colorful.

I mean, it was colorful.

It was summer in France.

There was like flower stalls everywhere and the sky was like impossibly blue.

And I felt better than I had felt in a really long time.

And did you understand how much of that was being able to like still be like yourself, but not Molly Ringwald all the time?

I think it was pretty clear to me that it had a lot to do with feeling free.

I was a free woman in Paris.

I felt unfettered and alive.

And I mean, French people have access to films.

Why can you turn American fame off in France?

Well, you can't now, but at the time, the movies that I had done, they weren't huge hits there.

Now they're known because they've, of course, played on television.

They're sort of like considered cult movies now, like iconic films, which is always kind of like surprising now when I'm in France and I'm recognized.

Because it's the place where you're used to having fame camouflage.

Exactly.

But when I moved to France, like there are whole bits of the 90s that I feel like I kind of missed because I was living in a country where everything was not available.

Like where you didn't have like every single television channel that exists.

Were they like not watching Seinfeld?

No.

Something French instead?

Yeah.

Interesting.

Something French.

But yeah, the movies that I did weren't that well known.

And then I also dyed my hair like dark brown

to kind of like blend in because the red does kind of set you apart a little.

So what was it like to be able to take off like the robe of fame?

Did you miss it at all?

No.

Not at all.

I didn't.

I mean, I will say like the only

thing that I think I missed

would be automatically being able to get a good table in a a restaurant.

I knew that's what you were going to say.

I absolutely knew that's what you were going to say.

Restaurants.

Yeah,

that's it.

I feel like it was, there was something really nice about feeling like

if somebody responded to me, they were responding to me, like the real me,

or as much as they knew the real me.

You weren't constantly in conversation with your own reputation or wondering what someone was reacting to or what they wanted or how you might disappoint them.

Yes.

Yeah.

Which you probably hadn't had as an adult, like just the normal, the normal levels of self-consciousness that a normal person has.

Yeah.

It felt like I suddenly was somewhere like without a weapon.

I didn't have this fancy sword or whatever.

It was just me and my muscles got strong because of it.

Were there things you had to learn how to do?

Well, yeah, speak French.

I mean, like,

I mean, we're like, I don't know.

I imagine that if you're very famous in America in the 1980s, you probably don't know how funny you are because people are going to like laugh at your jokes a little bit more or something.

Like, you don't know, you don't know what your level of charm is separate from people's excitedness to just like see a person who they've seen in a film.

Yeah, definitely.

And then also you throw in the extra thing about being American too.

And so you're dealing with the French that French.

They sort of don't like you.

Yes.

And were you acting in france i was still acting but i think i definitely put my career on the back burner like it wasn't as important to me and i also felt kind of like burned in hollywood

i i felt like i wasn't really valued at that point

but also i will say

because i've thought a lot about it too.

I'm like, did I kind of tank my career because I moved to France or were there other elements at play as well?

And I had done one of Miramax's first movies that Harvey Weinstein produced.

And I had to sue Harvey Weinstein.

Back then?

I did, yeah.

Not for any sexual impropriety.

I was very lucky in that regard.

He just didn't pay me what he was contractually obligated to pay me.

He just didn't.

He just like, the film was not a success, but I had like a percentage of the gross.

And he just didn't pay.

And my lawyer called and said, Harvey Weinstein's not paying you for this.

And I think that we need to go after it.

And I said, go ahead.

And she did.

And I got paid.

But it was just coming into an era where everything interesting that was done.

pretty much was done by Harvey Weinstein.

So I think that might have had something to do with it.

I don't know.

It was just kind of like this, this

period of time where I wasn't obscure, but it was just like I felt like everyone was kind of like waiting for a comeback.

Did you want to come back?

I wanted to do movies that were interesting to me.

Yeah.

It's hard because the fame is a double-edged sword because the fame makes life kind of

difficult to navigate on the one hand, but then if you have a certain level of fame, that it enables you to do the projects that you want to do.

Like all movies get made basically, you know, somebody has to raise the money.

And the only way that they can raise the money is if they go after this list and they'll say, okay, for this part, if you get, you know, Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow, whatever the list is.

Yeah.

And for a while, I was on that list.

And then I kind of like got booted off that list.

And there's only so many parts to go around.

Yeah.

And then the older that you get, the less parts there are.

So for a big chunk of that time, I kind of like took myself out of the running for a lot of interesting things or it just wasn't considered.

I don't know.

Did you regret that?

Because it also sounds like it was what you needed.

no, I think it was what I needed.

I mean, to come back to your point about how

I am

sane, which my kids would debate you on that.

But I think, as

actors go, I think I am pretty sane.

And I think I am pretty centered.

And I think the only way really that I was able to do that and to have that kind of longevity was to go away and do what I did and to sort of opt out of that like hamster wheel that I was in.