Molly Ringwald Found ‘The Breakfast Club’ Dance Scene Most Embarrassing — Here’s Why

While chatting with Time Magazine’s Olivia B. Waxman during the anniversary of The Breakfast Club in 2015, Molly Ringwald disclosed that having to dance in the movie was most embarrassing for her. Molly, who played the film’s troublemaker Claire Standish as a 16-year-old, recalled her worst moment on set to be “the whole dance sequence.”

She told Olivia that, “it was supposed to be just my character dancing in the original script. I’ve never really considered myself a dancer. I took dance lessons, but I was more of a singer. I was like ‘Ah God, I don’t know about this.”

Director John Hughes tried to help Molly Ringwald feel better about the dance scene in ‘The Breakfast Club’

Director John Hughes was kind enough to change the script so Molly could feel better about her dancing, and though it helped, she could hardly get over feeling embarrassed to date. “Hughes was like, ‘What if we make everyone dance? Would that be better?’ I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do that,” Molly reminisced. ” And so that’s sort of how it ended up being a whole dance sequence.”

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The now 46-year-old thinks the group dancing, which is “one of the most dated parts of the movie,” did not exactly improve it. Decades after its release, The Breakfast Club remains one of the best teen films of all time. She joked that making the classic in the 2010s would have been boring as “no one would have talked.”

“We would have all just been sitting there with our phones texting our friends,” she explained.

40 years after playing Claire, Molly rewatched her 1985 film with her 20-year-old daughter Mathilda Gianopoulos earlier this year. She pointed out some aspects of the classic featuring sexual harassment that “haven’t aged well.”

“Like Judd Nelson’s character, John Bender, who essentially sexually harasses my character,” she told UK news outlet, The Times.

Regardless of things she wishes she could change about The Breakfast Club, including having to dance, the mother of three is “glad we’re able to look at that and say things are truly different now.” She also noted a positive side to the movie, saying it gave teens the freedom to express their feelings. “It says that teenagers’ feelings really matter,” she said. “And I think that’s a really powerful message and for that reason I really love it.”