Breakfast Club star Molly Ringwald reveals why she turned down iconic Pretty Woman role

The hit '90s film Pretty Woman could have had an entirely different lead actress, Hollywood starlet Molly Ringwald has revealed.

While we all know Julia Roberts as the iconic Vivian Ward, who navigated a rocky love story with her client, Edward Lewis – played by Richard Gere – it seems things could have been entirely different if it weren’t for a rising star turning down the role.

Speaking to The Guardian, Molly Ringwald – who starred in The Breakfast Club – revealed she turned down the lead role in Pretty Woman because the film was “icky.

“Julia Roberts was wonderful in it, but I didn’t really like the story. Even then, I felt like there was something icky about it,” she said.

This isn’t the first time the actress has spoken about her decision to turn down the iconic role, People magazine reported she also spoke about it in 2012 during a Reddit AMA.

“I think I saw an early draft and it was called $3,000. I don’t specifically remember turning it down,” she shared on the internet forum. “The script was okay, but I gotta say, Julia Roberts is what makes that movie. It was her part. Every actor hopes for a part that lets them shine like that.”

The romantic comedy followed a sex worker hired by a rich businessman to be his date before the two ultimately fell in love and had to learn to bridge the gap between their two worlds.

While it earned Roberts a Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture – music or comedy, and an Academy Award nomination for best actress – Ringwald felt the role wasn’t right for her.

Noting that she turned down the role and later missed out on roles in The Silence of the Lambs and Working Girl, the Hollywood alum said, ”I didn’t really feel like darker roles were available to me.”

The actress continued to say during that period of her career was a “weird in-between stage” explaining, “The ones that I wanted to do, I didn’t get. I was too young for certain roles. I was at this weird in-between stage.”

It comes after Roberts revealed in 2019 that the film originally had a “heavy” ending. While appearing in Variety’s Actors on Actors conversation series, the '90s romcom actress said fans would have been surprised by the original ending.

“Threw her out of the car, threw the money on top of her, as memory serves, and just drove away, leaving her in some dirty alley,” Roberts recalled.

She also explained how she landed the role, claiming it was a rocky road as she landed it but then the production company went bust over the weekend “and by Monday, I didn’t have a job”.

“There was one producer that stayed with the script, and it went to Disney. I thought, ‘Went to Disney? Are they going to animate it?’” Roberts said.

“(Director) Garry Marshall came on, and because he’s a great human being, he felt it would only be fair to meet me since I had this job for three days and lost it.

“And they changed the whole thing. And it became more something that is in my wheelhouse.”

Marshall’s version of Pretty Woman was released in 1990 and has solidified itself as one of the most popular romantic comedies of all time.

This article was first published in the NZ Herald and is republished here with edits and permission.