Ally Sheedy from The Breakfast Club hated her onscreen makeover
EVERYONE loves the classic coming-of-age movie, ‘The Breakfast Club’. But now one of its stars says she wasn’t a fan of one of the film’s pivotal, iconic scenes. .
CAN YOU believe it’s been 30 years since The Breakfast Club was released?
The iconic John Hughes coming-of-age drama, which follows five very different high school students as they slog it out through Saturday detention, became an instant cult classic for its bang-on portrayal of teenage angst.
But remember the famous scene at the end of the film where Molly Ringwald gives Ally Sheedy a glam makeover?
Turns out, Sheedy wasn’t exactly a fan of that scene.
“I don’t know if [director] John [Hughes] 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,” Sheedy told Elle magazine.
“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. I wish it had been a little more of that and a little less of, ‘Let’s make her pretty.’
Sheedy says the makeover scene is an outdated film cliche.
“I don’t know why, but ‘the makeover’ was kind of a big thing. A normal teenager suddenly becomes the princess. Even in Harry Potter all of a sudden Hermione has the dance sequence where she comes in in a dress and somehow she’s glamorous.
“It wasn’t my thing at all. I’m not a big makeup person and I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea that you have to look a certain way to suddenly look gorgeous to everyone. I like how Allison looked anyway.
“But it was a moment of passage in that movie. It had to do, I guess, with her becoming more part of the group in some way. Not using what she looked like to put people off. To become more inviting in some way. And then Emilio’s character had to somehow see her as pretty.
“Honestly, I have no idea. I don’t think it needed to happen. But I think everybody needed to have their moment of truth and I guess that was something for Allison.”
Watch the scene here.
This isn’t the first time tales of sexism have emerged from The Breakfast Club set.
According to a recent biography of John Hughes, John Hughes: A Life In Film by Kirk Honeycutt, an earlier screenplay of the film included a scene which featured “gratuitous female nudity.”
“When Hughes came to shoot The Breakfast Club, the ex-Lampooner was still searching for the right tone for his own brand of teen film. During rehearsals in Chicago, his two young actresses, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, joined swiftly by co-producer Michelle Manning, ganged up on him.
They strongly objected to the gratuitous female nudity in the screenplay,” Honeycutt wrote in this excerpt, published in Vanity Fair.
“To break up a highly claustrophobic talkathon, Hughes had written a sequence in which the school’s synchronised-swimming team came by to practice with its extremely sexy P.E. teacher.
“The youngsters would sneak out of the library and find a peephole into the women’s locker room. There, they would spy the well-endowed P.E. teacher topless. Karen Leigh Hopkins, who would later find success as an actress and screenwriter, was cast in the role.
“’This is really sexist and misogynistic’, they told Hughes. ‘Why would you do this?’
“Hughes listened. That night he sat down to rewrite. The next morning Hughes came in with a new version, where a janitor replaced the P.E. teacher.”
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