For anybody who was a teenager in the 1980s, one face pretty much is the decade. And this year, at 58, that face is walking into one of the most talked-about shows on television.
Molly Ringwald was the 80s teenager. Not a teenager. The teenager.
In a three-year run that basically defined a genre, she carried “Sixteen Candles” in 1984, “The Breakfast Club” in 1985, and “Pretty in Pink” in 1986. If you were sixteen and awkward and convinced nobody understood you, she was up there on the screen being sixteen and awkward and understood for all of you. A whole generation grew up on that red hair and that quietly stubborn chin.
Directors called her a muse. Magazines put her on their covers. For a stretch she was the most famous teenager in America who wasn’t a pop star.
And then, on purpose, she didn’t spend the next forty years cashing in on it.
She moved to Paris for a while. She raised a family. She wrote. She’s the author of two well-received books, and she writes essays with the kind of clear eye you don’t expect from someone the tabloids had filed under “teen star.” When Andrew McCarthy made “Brats,” his 2024 documentary rounding up the old Brat Pack to talk about those years, Ringwald politely passed. She’d made her peace with that chapter in her own way and on her own terms.
She never actually went anywhere, mind you. She turned up in “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” in 2024, sharp and grown and completely at home in a prestige cast.
But this next one is the one that made everybody sit up.
According to Deadline and a wave of outlets this past February, Molly Ringwald is joining “Yellowjackets” for its fourth and final season.
If you don’t watch it, here’s the short version. “Yellowjackets” is a dark, twisty survival drama about a girls’ soccer team that goes down in the wilderness and the grown women they become decades later, still carrying what happened out there. It is nobody’s idea of a teen movie. It’s the exact opposite. And that turns out to be the whole point.
Ringwald is set to play Vicky, the mother of a character named Van. Reports describe Vicky as newly sober, a woman with a hard road behind her and a complicated bond with her daughter ahead of her. In other words, a real, weathered, grown-up part, the kind the teen queen of the 80s has spent decades quietly earning the right to play.
There’s something almost perfect about it. The girl who once stood at the center of every high-school story is now the mother at the far edge of a story about what those girls become. The camera loved her at sixteen. It’s about to find out what she can do at fifty-eight.
Off screen, she’s been building the sort of life that tends to make an actor better. Three kids with her husband, Panio Gianopoulos. A house full of the ordinary, unglamorous stuff that most “where are they now” stories never get to. She grew up. She got interesting.
For everyone who taped those movies off cable and watched them until the tape wore thin, this is a small, happy piece of news. The face of the 80s isn’t a memory. She’s near the top of the call sheet on the last season of a show everybody’s arguing about.
Turns out the most famous teenager in America grew into a pretty formidable woman.
