Molly Ringwald’s 1980s collaborations with director John Hughes are legendary, but now she’s looking at them in a new light.

Ringwald, 57, opened up about her experiences during the March 11 episode of the Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky podcast. Lewinsky, 51, asked the actress about the story that Hughes — who died in 2009 at age 59 — wrote 1984’s Sixteen Candles thanks to inspiration from Ringwald’s headshot.

“Yeah, he wrote that just based on a headshot,” the actress said. He had just moved agencies, and they gave him headshots of many of their clients, and he was drawn to Ringwald’s. “He put that up on his bulletin board above his computer station and he wrote this movie,” she said. “And so when it came time to cast it, and they said ‘Who do you want?’ he said, ‘The girl I wrote this about.’ So we met and the rest is history.”

Lewinsky asked the Riverdale actress about the impact of knowing she was his “muse.” “He did tell me the story when we first met,” she said, but noted that at the time, she was just 15 herself. “I had nothing to compare it to,” she added. Though she had already done more movies than Hughes (who made his directorial debut with Sixteen Candles), she noted, “I was still only 15 years old so I didn’t have a lot of life experience. It didn’t seem that strange to me.”

“Now it does,” she said. Lewinsky asked if it felt more strange but “still complimentary” or strange in a “creepy” way.

“It’s peculiar,” Ringwald said. “It always felt incredibly complimentary, but looking back on it there was something a little peculiar.” Lewinsky said that when you look at some of the plots of Sixteen Candles through an “adult prism of someone staring at your photo,” it does feel different. 

Ringwald said, “It’s something that I turn over in my head a lot and try to figure out how that all affected me and I’m still processing all of that and I probably will until the day I die.”

After Sixteen Candles, Ringwald also starred in Hughes’ 1985 classic The Breakfast Club (though she noted that he had written that script before he ever saw her photo). In 1986, she starred in another Hughes teen movie, Pretty in Pink. Ringwald and other teen movie stars from the era became known as The Brat Pack. 

Speaking to Lewinsky, Ringwald acknowledged the teen movies made her “really, really famous.” “Even though I was happy with the movies I was doing, all the fame and the notoriety, I found it really overwhelming and scary,” she said. 

“It changed me a bit,” the star explained. “I became very closed and very self-protective in a way that a lot of people sort of misinterpreted. People thought that I was aloof or stuck up. And it wasn’t, it was fear.”