Although we’ve bid farewell to side ponytails, power suits and popped-up collars, one ‘80s icon is looking to remind the generation that grew up beside her that their health matters just as much as nostalgia.
After years of playing characters who helped define an era of teen angst, Molly Ringwald, 58, is using her voice for a new cause, partnering with Pfizer and its VaxAssist platform to raise awareness of pneumococcal pneumonia and remind Gen X they shouldn’t play hooky on visiting their doctor’s office.
“One thing that really struck me was the fact that after the age of 50, we are six times more likely to contract pneumococcal pneumonia,” Ringwald exclusively told Us about the prominence of the illness. “I felt as the ultimate Gen X poster girl, it was a good idea to use my platform to just let other people know that this vaccine is available, that it can help save your life.”
But the conversation around health isn’t one the actress is reserving for audiences who watched her navigate the growing pains of adolescence on screen (including the occasional Saturday detentions and juvenile love triangles). Ringwald says she has plenty of “frank” conversations with her own children.
“I’m just really straight with them. I think you know they have agency over themselves and their bodies, and we talk about everything from vaccines to sunscreen to anything for their health,” she told Us. “It’s their health, it’s their bodies and their futures, and I think they care about it just like I care about my health and my future.”
The mother of three — daughter Mathilda, 22, and 17-year-old twins Adele and Roman, whom she shares with her husband, Panio Gianopoulos — admits that although she doesn’t revisit the coming-of-age classics on her own, she has introduced her children to the films that made her a household name.
“I don’t actually have cable, so anything that I watch is a choice,” she candidly shared. “And the only time that I’ve really watched the John Hughes movies was when I watched them with my kids, and that was a choice.”
As the actress prepares to play Van Palmer’s mother in the Paramount+ series Yellowjackets, Ringwald says her character, Vicky, is much more “flawed” than the poignant parent she played in the past to Shailene Woodley in The Secret Life of an American Teenager or KJ Apa in Riverdale.
“I was already a fan of the show,” she said, recalling a chance encounter with a cast member at the Sundance Film Festival that led to her receiving a role. “I think it has a lot of great actors in it and it’s fun watching women my age being fierce and bad and naughty. I love it.”
Beyond her return to TV, the actress also revealed she isn’t done writing her own story. As for what else is in the works, Ringwald says she’s currently penning a memoir called The Paris Years, which she says will take readers down memory lane and chronicle her years in France during her 20s and says directing is something she’s “always wanted to do.”
“I spent sort of coming of age in Paris because I kind of came of age a little bit later because I was working when I was a teenager. So the 20s were really when I kind of came of age,” she told Us, adding she plans to begin writing and directing once her book is finished.
