What My “My So-Called Life” Taught Me About Beauty - Bitch Media
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Would the character have been as resonant as a pretty blond? It’s been widely reported that Clueless star Alicia Silverstone, who started modeling at the age of six, was almost cast as Angela. In a 2013 retrospective, MSCL’s co-executive producer, Marshall Herskovitz, revealed that they ultimately decided on Claire Danes because she wasn’t conventionally attractive. “Alicia is so beautiful that that would have affected her experience of the world,” he told The New Yorker. “People would have been telling her she was beautiful since she was six years old. You can’t put that face in what’s been written for this girl.”
Danes was to ‘90s teen TV what Molly Ringwald was to ‘80s teen movies. A decade before MSCL premiered, John Hughes had been inspired by Ringwald’s head shot, which showed a pouty freckle-faced redhead, to write Sixteen Candles. And he proceeded to lean on her “charismatic normality,” as film critic Paulina Kael put it, in 50 percent of the films that made up his teen canon. In Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club, Ringwald provided a welcome antidote to the buxom blonds that bounced across the reels of Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds. As Jake Ryan, the hunky senior in Sixteen Candles, says of her to a meathead friend who wonders why he’d bother, “Maybe I’m interested in more than a party.” Ringwald’s characters, like Angela, craved something deeper than her hormones did. “What turned things around for me is remembering how serious I was at that age,” Hughes told The New York Times in 1986. “It’s the point in your life where you’re most serious, yet, due to conditions beyond your control, you’re also at your geekiest.”