Molly Ringwald got candid in a recent TV interview, calling a high-profile project “the worst” acting experience of her decades-long career.
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The Sixteen Candles icon popped by Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen on Aug. 4 and didn’t hold back during the “Spill the IMDb Tea” portion of the show. In the segment, Cohen grills an actor about their past roles, asking them to rate each experience from 1 to 10.
After giving projects like Jem and the Holograms a 7 and Pretty in Pink a perfect 10, Cohen made his way to The Secret Life of the American Teenager, an ABC Family drama Ringwald starred in from 2008 to 2013.
The 58-year-old’s face soured before she clarified the rating system, asking, “The worst is 1?”
“Okay, that was it. The worst,” she added as the studio audience gasped.
Ringwald played Anne Juergens, the mom of Shailene Woodley’s Amy Juergens on the teen pregnancy drama. The show also starred India Eisley as Ashley Juergens and Ken Baumann as Ben Boykewich.
Pushing back at the shocked studio audience, Ringwald quickly explained, “It was a hard… okay. I loved the cast. I loved Shailene, there’s so many people that I worked with that… there was one person that was really difficult.”
When pushed, Ringwalk insisted that she was “not going to say who that one person is,” before adding that they “brought it down to a 1.”
With Woodley eliminated as the cause of the 1 rating for her experience on The Secret Life of the American Teenager, one can’t help but wonder who the thorn in Ringwald’s side was. Indeed, plenty of internet sleuths speculated in the comments section of the YouTube post of the segment.
“She said she loved the cast. So, it must have been a producer or director,” one top comment read. “If it was that consistently bad, likely a producer or the creator, since there are so many different directors across episodes,” another onlooker reasoned.
Some commentators suggested the culprit was the series creator Brenda Hampton, though they had nothing to back up the claims.
In fairness, Ringwald also gave her early acting experience on the classic sitcom The Facts of Life a 2. Still, the reasoning there was that she was unceremoniously booted from the show at age 12.
In the meantime, the cosmic ballet continues, and speculation abounds.