Molly Ringwald turned down the ‘Icky’ ‘Pretty Woman’ role

Molly Ringwald may have been pretty in pink, but that doesn’t mean she wanted to be “Pretty Woman.”

The “Pretty in Pink” and “Sixteen Candles” icon revealed that she turned down the lead role in the 1990 rom-com “Pretty Woman,” which launched Julia Roberts’ career. Ringwald was approached to play a sex worker hired by a successful businessman (Richard Gere) to stay in Los Angeles.

“Julia Roberts was amazing in it, but I didn’t really like the story,” Ringwald said The guardian. “Even then I felt there was something unpleasant about it.”

Ringwald also revealed that she was turned down for roles in “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Working Girl.”

“I didn’t really feel that darker roles were available to me. The ones I wanted to do, I didn’t get,” Ringwald recalled. “I was too young for certain roles. I was in this weird in-between stage.”

Mike Nichols told Ringwald during his audition for “Working Girl” that he couldn’t relate to the character climbing the corporate ladder: “It has to be very much in the moment where he’s in pain,” Nichols recalled, adding. , “”You have your whole life ahead of you – no one will believe that about you.”

The potentially problematic nature of “Pretty Woman” was recently discussed on Karina Longworth’s “You Must Remember This” podcast about the Erotic ’90s. However, Longworth told IndieWire that the film “humanizes” Roberts’ character.

“It conveys the idea that even if you don’t agree with what he does for a living, he’s still a human being. And that seems almost radical in this period,” Longworth said. “There are so many conversations then and now about what these movies reflect about women and what they say, whether they portray women in a good or bad light or not, and what they communicate about women. And there is so little conversation about what is being communicated about men and masculinity. While writing Pretty Woman, I became interested in Richard Gere’s character and the idea that (he’s the only one) who really has to change his personality, his life, and how he relates to people. And they can only have a relationship if he treats her like a human being. The male character has to change and he has to.”

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