Naomi Burns, Molly Ringwald. Disney/Erica Hernandez;Ivan Apfel/Getty Images
Claim to Fame season 3 contestant Naomi Burns wouldn’t have done the ABC reality show without the blessing of her cousin Molly Ringwald.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for season 3 of Claim to Fame.
“I have so much respect for Molly that I would’ve never even considered doing this if she wasn’t OK with it,” Naomi exclusively told Us Weekly after she was eliminated during the Wednesday, July 31, episode. “I needed, for myself, her approval. [I] was like, ‘Is this something you’d be comfortable with? I’m kind of interested in doing it, but if you don’t want me to, I absolutely will not.’ And she was like, ‘You know what, why not? Have fun.’”
Naomi added that “privacy is really big” in her family, and Ringwald, 56, reminded her of that before she appeared on Claim to Fame.
“She [was] like, ‘As long as you respect my privacy like you always have, we’re golden,’” Naomi recalled. “[She said], ‘Have a good time.’”
Ringwald recently opted to stay out of the spotlight by not participating in Andrew McCarthy’s documentary Brats, which premiered on Hulu in June. Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Jon Cryer, Demi Moore and Rob Lowe all spoke to McCarthy, 61, in Brats about their experience with the Brat Pack label.
Last month, McCarthy exclusively told Us that he wished Ringwald had sat down with him for the film due to her “articulate and insightful” perspective.
“She said she’d think about it and that was really the end of it,” he said of asking Ringwald to participate.
Andrew McCarthy is reclaiming the Brat Pack name with help from his former costars — some of whom he hadn’t seen in 30 years. Spoilers for Brats ahead. “If you were coming of age in the 1980s, then the Brat Pack was at or near the center of your cultural awareness,” McCarthy, 61, said during […]
Naomi, meanwhile, never had to specifically ask Ringwald about Claim to Fame because the 16 Candles actress overheard her telling another family member about the show.
“When I was presented with the opportunity, the first thing I did was I called [Molly’s] mother. She’s hard of hearing because she’s older, and so she had me on speakerphone and I was like, ‘Aunt Adele, you’ll never guess [what’s happening],’” Naomi recalled to Us. “And all of a sudden I hear, ‘What are you talking about?’ And I’m like, ‘Is Molly there?’ And she was like, ‘Yes.’ And I was like, ‘Well, great. Let’s just have a family meeting.’”
Naomi, who goes by @n.elizajane on Instagram and TikTok, spent time living with Molly’s family when she was growing up, which strengthened her bond with her cousins.
“I feel like it was more than cousins but less than siblings,” Naomi explained. “Having so much love and respect for her parents and seeing them as pseudo-parental figures for myself, I started seeing them as more than cousins just because of how close we were.”
Naomi added that after she graduated from college, Ringwald and her husband, Panio Gianopoulos, encouraged her to move to Los Angeles, where they were living.
A romance for the decades! Molly Ringwald didn’t need to wish on 16 candles to find her true love in husband Panio Gianopoulos. The ‘80s icon and the writer might be one of Hollywood’s quieter couples, but they are certainly among the strongest. Following Ringwald’s split from ex-husband Valery Lameignère in 2002, she welcomed daughter […]
“They were like, ‘You don’t know if you wanna go to college yet, why don’t you come down here and see what you wanna do?’” she recalled. “I was able to travel, I was able to do things I never would’ve done otherwise. I’m so thankful for all the opportunities that [Molly] gave me.”
Naomi’s elimination from Claim to Fame marked the first time all season that a contestant correctly guessed another player’s celebrity relative. (Bianca Roberts, Jill Kurlfink, Gracie Lou Hyland and Raphael “Miguel” Curtis were all previously eliminated after making wrong guesses.) Although Naomi’s ally Adam made the guess, he didn’t come up with the information himself. He had to write Ringwald’s name on his arm to remember it during the guess-off.
“He actually didn’t know who she was at all,” Naomi told Us. “The frustrating part was finding out who had him write it on [his] arm.”
Naomi’s other ally Hud ultimately tipped Adam off about her secret celebrity connection after getting paranoid about her having a clue about his relative. Although the trio agreed to get each other’s clues and safeguard them from other competitors, Hud ultimately decided that Naomi was too big of a threat to his game.
“It was just a big miscommunication,” Naomi said. “I actually did allude to Hud who I thought his person was, and I was wrong. … He just wasn’t paying attention to what I was saying. We talked about that after the fact, and we were hysterically laughing at each other, because he’s like, ‘I should have listened to what you were saying because if I knew that you hadn’t actually figured my clue out completely, I would’ve never given your name to Adam.’”
Despite feeling betrayed by Hud and referring to Adam as “entitled” on the show, Naomi isn’t holding any grudges against her former allies.
“We are all friends now, the entire cast,” she said. “We have a saying, ‘What happens in the house, stays in the house.’ We’re all super close.”
Claim to Fame airs Wednesdays on ABC at 9 p.m. ET.
