Debates can be had over whether certain actors “count” as members of the Brat Pack, a label applied to a certain subset of young actors who all came of age in the 1980s. Molly Ringwald is without question one of them, but she’s not a fan of the term. “I think it kind of in a way sort of minimized the work that we were doing. I mean that’s the way that I felt,” she said on a recent reunion panel for The Breakfast Club at MegaCon Orlando.
NME reports that the now-veteran actor called the Brat Pack term “a pejorative,” one that proved hard for those actors to escape over the years since New York Magazine writer David Blum coined it for a 1985 feature.
This isn’t the first time someone dubbed a member of the Brat Pack has spoken out about the term’s effects on their lives and careers — it seems like most of Ringwald’s former co-stars have complicated feelings about it, which they grappled with at length in the 2024 Hulu documentary Brats. Directed by Brat Pack alum Andrew McCarthy, the doc featured extended interviews with Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Lea Thompson and Jon Cryer. Ringwald declined to be interviewed at that time.
Being dubbed a member of the Brat Pack didn’t necessarily end peoples’ careers: Lowe has become a television mainstay in the past few decades as both a series star and game show host. Cryer now sits on a giant pile of Two and a Half Men cash and got to play Lex Luthor across multiple CW series. And Moore is in the middle of a stunning comeback moment, one that may soon culminate in her winning an Oscar for her work in The Substance.
Ringwald herself was recently featured in the star-studded FX limited series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, and also appeared in multiple seasons of The CW’s Riverdale. She also recently acknowledged that The Breakfast Club, one of her early hits, hasn’t aged all that well.