Molly Ringwald, the legendary star of The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, returns to the screen this week in the deliciously scandalous Disney+ show Feud: Capote vs the Swans, about Truman Capote and his devastated falling out with New York’s wealthy socialite wives. It’s a role that takes her right back.
“I was in an adaptation of his story, The Grass Harp, and I did that when I was three and a half,” she tells me. It was a community theatre performance in which she played an infant dubbed Fig Newton by the cast.
“He was a writer that I knew about even before I knew about Dr Seuss or normal kids’ writers. And it was kind of an intriguing name for a child. I mean, ‘Truman Capote’. It just sounded so magical.”
Now, her career has come full circle. In Feud, she plays Joanne Carson, the vilified society wife who became Capote’s closest confidante in his later years – to the extent that he actually died at her house in Bel Air.
This is the second in the Feud anthology series created by Ryan Murphy, the man behind hit shows such as American Horror Story, Glee, Pose and more.
The first series tackled the animosity between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and starred Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange. This new season is set to explore the relationship between Capote and his ‘Swans’: the gaggle of elegant society wives with whom he lunched.
They confided their darkest secrets in him, only for the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood to betray them. He published the thinly veiled stories in a magazine article – an excerpt from a (never-finished) book. The resulting fallout torpedoed his social standing and set him off on a depressive spiral from which he never recovered.
“I wonder sometimes if it was almost a deliberate thing: you know, just reset his life,” Ringwald ponders. “Or if it was just cruelty, because he did have a cruel streak.”
Either way, it was devastating for Capote: shunned by society and reduced to a figure of fun, he succumbed to the throes of an alcohol and drug addiction that killed him at the age of 59.
“I remember watching him as a little girl on The Tonight Show, or whatever my parents had on television, and I was really intrigued by him,” Ringwald recalls.
“In a lot of the interviews, he was just completely drunk and almost incoherent, and my mom would just say, ‘Oh, that's Truman Capote, he’s drunk. He’s an alcoholic.’”
“I can't really think of that many people who have spiralled in such a public way. I mean, like Kanye West or something, where you're just watching somebody who's really so talented just completely self-destructing, and in public. It really made an impression on me.”
In the show, the role of Capote is taken by British actor Tom Hollander – whose high-pitched voice and prosthetics make him look uncannily like the real thing.
“It was like watching a magician pull something out of a hat,” Ringwald laughs. “They would get ready to roll and… then his posture which change and then he would start talking as Truman before it even started to roll.”
Born in 1968, Ringwald started acting young (The Grass Harp was one of her first roles – though it’s unclear whether it’s her earliest) and she shot to fame in the Eighties in John Hughes’ trio of seminal teen films, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink.
As her star rose, Ringwald’s association with Capote followed her into young adulthood, too. “I was approached in the Eighties by the Truman Capote Estate about doing another adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” she says.
“He had never apparently been happy with the film... Audrey Hepburn is so incredibly beautiful and chic and elegant and that was really not the character that he had written. And I was tempted.” Ringwald ultimately turned the part down, but now she sounds slightly wistful about it.
“It would have had to have been so different. I was just watching Ripley, the new version of Patricia Highsmith’s book, and I think this is the third adaptation… and it's so interesting because I think that all of them are so good, but [they’re] all very different and I think that should be possible.”
Could her own films stand to be remade? Her answer: kind of.
“I feel like they're really very much of their time… at least of the John Hughes movies, they weren't based on source material like Breakfast at Tiffany’s was. It's not like reinterpreting a book. I think if you were to do any of those movies again, they would really have to represent a different time.
“They would have to be more diverse. The Breakfast Club for one, it would be very different now. I mean, for one thing, we would all be on our phones.”
Phones or not, what has stayed the same over the past 50 years is just how vile people can be to each other. Certainly that’s what happens in Feud; following Capote’s betrayal, the society wives plot to destroy his life completely.
“He will have no one,” says Diane Lane’s Slim Keith, after the author’s infamous article is published. “Nothing. Everyone will see it. Everyone will watch. He will have no door open to him. He will have no oxygen. And then he will die.”
But imagine if they had smartphones and social media. In the Seventies, the Swans could only do battle using magazines and newspapers; now, with social media at our fingertips everything is up for grabs. Does Ringwald feel like it’s easier to cancel people these days?
“Yes… I think the internet has really facilitated that. I think that there's a cruelty to the internet that people have that they wouldn't if they were in front of a person,” she says.
“And then of course there's the mob aspect of it. You read something and everybody just piles on; I think it’s something that we need to get a handle on, because it's unsustainable and terrible.”
Perhaps that’s why Ringwald pivoted into writing in her adulthood – though she has continued to appear on TV in shows like Netflix’s Dahmer and Riverdale, writing seems to be her great love – or perhaps it’s down to the scarcity of meaty roles for older women.
“I feel like I kind of went from playing teenagers straight into mom roles, with very little in between,” she says.
“I think mothers can be really interesting, but there's just so many projects where the mothers are just there to service a character, and it's about someone else whether it's the son, the daughter, the husband, whatever.”
With that in mind, she says, Capote vs the Swans has been a “godsend” – and a welcome change. “Look, roles for actresses of any age are limited – more limited than roles for men for sure, and the older you get the more challenging it is to find good roles,” she says frankly.
“So I think that a project like this and the success of a project like this, is really fantastic, because a lot of the arguments, are, ‘Oh well, nobody would be interested or nobody would watch it or you know and that's clearly not the case... I like to prove the fact that there are stories to be told that are interesting.”
