Andrew McCarthy and Molly Ringwald in 'Pretty in Pink'

Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

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Here is something Andrew McCarthy did not do before he agreed to star in Pretty in Pink: read the script.

“I needed a job and I needed the $50,000 they were going to pay me,” the actor, 63, tells host Seth Abramovitch on this week’s episode of It Happened in Hollywood. “So I read the script on the way out, on the plane.”

What he found next alarmed him. In John Hughes’ original screenplay, his character Blane — the dreamy rich kid who wins working-class Andie Walsh’s heart — didn’t actually deserve her. By the end, he buckles under peer pressure and dumps her entirely. McCarthy landed at LAX and went straight for the phone.

“I called my agent and said, ‘You’ve got to get me out of this movie. This guy’s a jerk.'”

It is one of several eye-opening revelations in a conversation that doubles as a love letter to a film that still makes teens and aging Gen X-ers cry. The occasion is the film’s 40th anniversary, and McCarthy, now deeply affectionate toward a movie he once dismissed as “a silly, tepid story about a girl who wants to go to a dance and makes a dress,” is in a generous and funny mood.

The part was written for a “broad-shouldered, square-jawed, quarterback hunk type,” he explains —which he decidedly was not at 22. But when he auditioned, a certain someone in the room disagreed with the conventional wisdom.

“Molly apparently turned to John and Howie and said, ‘That’s the guy.'” Hughes, characteristically blunt, shot back: “That wimp?” Ringwald held firm. McCarthy got the part. The rest is Brat Pack mythology.

Then there is the matter of the ending — the one you know, with the OMD song swelling as Blane finally tells Andie he believes in her. It wasn’t always that ending. The original version screened for test audiences in an Orange County mall, and the room turned ugly the moment Blane bailed on Andie.

Hughes spent weeks stewing before calling director Howie Deutsch with the solution. They had one day to reshoot. One problem: McCarthy was in New York doing a play, and had shaved his head to play a Marine.

“If they knew we’d still be talking about this movie 40 years later,” he says, laughing, “they would have paid for a better wig.” The bird’s nest of a hairpiece he wore for the now-iconic prom climax is, he insists, so bad it almost works in the scene’s favor. “It just made me look so sad.”

On the new episode, McCarthy and Abramovich also dig into how Hughes built the film’s legendary soundtrack, wandering onto set each morning with a boombox and a stack of cassettes, playing songs for the cast while they waited for camera setups.

They talk about how the VHS revolution transformed these films into generational totems, how Ringwald’s quiet steel defined the film’s moral center, and what it means for a movie to become, as McCarthy puts it, “an obligatory rite of passage” — the Catcher in the Rye of its era.

Four decades on, Pretty in Pink still hits somewhere between the knees and the chest. So does this conversation. Some highlights:

Let’s start at the beginning. How did you even get this part?

The part was written for a broad-shouldered, square-jawed, prom-king type. I was decidedly not that at 22. I was this frail, overly sensitive kind of guy. But I had just done St. Elmo’s Fire and there was a little buzz about that movie. So they said, “He’s not right for this at all, but he can audition if he wants.”

I went in, John was sitting in the back slumped on the floor looking vaguely disinterested, and I read my one scene. They said thank you. I left thinking it was a waste of my afternoon. And then Molly apparently turned to John and Howie Deutsch and said, “That’s the guy.” And John — to his credit, this is very John Hughes — said: “That wimp?”

Molly said: “No, he’s not some boring jock. He’s sensitive and soulful and poetic. He’s the guy.” And John, to his enormous credit, actually listened. He didn’t just give young people lip service. He put his money where his mouth was. From the moment he hired me, he was fully behind me. But it was entirely Molly who got me that job.

You also hadn’t read the script yet.

I read it on the plane to Los Angeles. I needed a job, and I needed the $50, 000 they were going to pay me. So I read it on the way out, an

Andrew McCarthy on 40 Years of<em> Pretty in Pink</em>