Molly Ringwald gives her blessing to Selena Gomez's Sixteen Candles-inspired TV series
"That just sounds fantastic," says the original Sixteen Candles star about the upcoming Peacock series
Earlier this month, it was announced that Selena Gomez, Tanya Saracho, and Gabriela Revilla Lugo are working on a “reconfiguration” of Sixteen Candles. They’re looking to reimagine John Hughes’ problematic classic as a TV series about four Latinas turning 15. The series will be titled 15 Candles.
Though this version seemingly has very little to do with the original film, Sixteen Candles star Molly Ringwald sees that as a good thing. In an interview with Deadline’s Rosy Cordero, who broke the news of the show, Ringwald gives her blessing to the forthcoming series, saying, “I’m so happy about that [show].”
She adds, “I really do feel like when people always ask me about rebooting my movies, I am like, ‘No those movies were wonderful,’ but what they should do is take inspiration from them and do something completely different but inspired, so that just sounds fantastic.”
Ringwald, who has two teenage daughters, Adele and Mathilda Gianopoulos, also told Deadline that she’d like for one of her daughters to play the show’s version of her character in the series. Of course, that’ll only happen if there actually happens to be a character based on Sam Baker (though that might be unlikely, given that the show is focused on Latinas and not Greek-American girls).
As previously reported, 15 Candles is a half-hour series heading to Peacock that will follow four teenage Latinas “as they overcome their feelings of invisibility while exploring what it means to leave childhood behind through the lens of the traditional female coming-of-age rite: the quinceañera.”
But while Ringwald has nothing to do with this new version of Sixteen Candles, life inadvertently imitated art for her. The actor recently posted a screenshot of a text conversation with her mom on her birthday; the screenshot shows that her mom had forgotten about it just like Sam’s family forgot about hers in the movie. In the text, Ringwald writes to her mom, “That’s it? You don’t have anything else to say to me today? …”