In the mid-1980s, Molly Ringwald fielded an intriguing proposal from the estate of Truman Capote.
“I had been offered to do a remake of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’” she recalls over tea on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “I was like, ‘No!,’ but it’s interesting. The movie was not at all what he had written.” Capote had envisioned protagonist Holly Golightly as a vivacious motormouth with none of Audrey Hepburn’s sangfroid; he’d wanted Marilyn Monroe. And Ringwald was coming off a run of films that included “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink,” which had made her a star and a standard-bearer for youth culture. While Ringwald had a different appeal from Monroe, her insouciant energy and quicksilver ability to shift her moods got closer to Capote’s character than did Hepburn’s reinvention in the 1961 film.
“I just thought that I would have been completely savaged if I did it,” Ringwald says. “But now that I look back on it, I’m like — why not?”
Ringwald, whose first onstage appearance was at age 3 in a local production of Capote’s “The Grass Harp,” is getting another shot at the literary master. In the new season of FX’s Ryan Murphy-produced “Feud,” subtitled “Capote vs. the Swans” and launching Jan. 31, Ringwald plays Joanne Carson, ex-wife of talk-show host Johnny and one of Capote’s most loyal friends. After the depressive, alcoholic novelist (played by Tom Hollander) alienates his New York circle of socialites by disclosing their secrets in a published short story, Joanne, living a quasi-enlightened hippie life in Los Angeles, offers a safe landing place.
“I was a little sad that I didn’t get to wear the New York swan clothes,” Ringwald says with a laugh. (Boho-fab Joanne presents an intentional contrast to the chic severity of Capote’s former circle, played by Naomi Watts, Demi Moore and Chloë Sevigny, among others.) And entering the story late — and shooting in California, while the Swans’ nest was a set in New York — made her experience different. Ringwald did, at least, get to know her contemporary Moore, with whom she had only glancingly crossed paths when they were “part of the Brat Pack or whatever,” she says. (Ringwald thinks of the idea as a media creation — but then acknowledges she was too young to have joined the rest of the Pack in “St. Elmo’s Fire.”)
Joanne’s entrance into the story provides some mercy for Capote, who has done wrong, but has a case too. “They knew what he did — he’s a writer,” Ringwald says. “I see both of their points of view.”
Joanne spins off Ringwald’s image doubly. Cast once again by Murphy after portraying the murderer’s sympathetic mother in “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” Ringwald says the producer “hires people based on their essence. So he obviously thinks that my essence is good.” And, as a published author and translator, with a memoir, a novel and two French-to-English translations under her belt, Ringwald has an acute understanding of the writer’s sensibility.
Part of Ringwald’s literary project has been excavating wrongdoing: Her 2018 New Yorker essay about her work with filmmaker John Hughes, for whom she expresses affection, recontextualizes the ways movies like “Sixteen Candles” treated girls and young women through the lens of the then-nascent #MeToo movement. (“How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose?,” she asked. “What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it?”) And her 2023 translation of Vanessa Schneider’s memoir “My Cousin Maria Schneider” documents the experience of the “Last Tango in Paris” actor, who accused director Bernardo Bertolucci and actor Marlon Brando of conspiratorially violating her during the movie’s most notorious sex scene, improvised on set. (Ringwald floats the idea that Bertolucci and Schneider should be the subject of a future “Feud” season.)
All of which lends Ringwald a sense of life’s, and the industry’s, complications — and its progress, which she’s also witnessed in recurring roles on “Riverdale” and in the “Kissing Booth” films. She’s watched with excitement and pride as her 20-year-old daughter, Mathilda Gianopoulos, prepares to take on her first movie roles, and has been happily astounded that she has intimacy coordinators on set. (Recalling the 1985 TV movie “Surviving: A Family in Crisis,” Ringwald is astonished: “I had to do a kissing scene on the first day of filming, in a wet bathing suit, in front of an entire crew that I didn’t know. And that wasn’t even something that they thought about!”)
What’s next, perhaps, is to find a character as open to complexity as she is. Ringwald, a devoted fan of Scandinavian filmmakers Ruben Östlund and Joachim Trier, found the rich depth of sympathy within Joanne, who understands Capote when no one else does. And she’s seeking something more too. “I’m sort of waiting for Ryan to offer me a psycho bitch!” she says. “That’s what I would love to do. I’m putting it out there.”