I Know What You Did Last Summer is in theaters July 18.
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Jennifer Love Hewitt is cheerfully explaining the concept of L.A.’s Universal CityWalk. She had suggested we meet here on a Monday morning and pulled up in a white SUV, hopping out at the valet parking, all five-foot-two of her, in a bright-pink blazer, wide-legged jeans, and shiny silver sneakers. Hewitt loves CityWalk. She has frequented it since she was a child and was here last week for her son’s 10th birthday at Buca di Beppo. “I grew up in Burbank, so this was, like, my teen life. People in the Valley call it the Little Times Square because of the lights,” she says, visibly calmed by the uniquely American chaos that surrounds us, including a Margaritaville, a Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., a skydiving wind tunnel, and hundreds of children who will soon combine these activities in the wrong order.
Hewitt wants a gigantic pretzel, but nothing is open yet. While we wait, she gives me an impromptu walking tour of her past. “This is where I had my first big red-carpet event,” she says, standing in front of what was once a Hard Rock Cafe. “I was like, What is happening? I was 15.” She points to another blocky building. “And this used to be an Abercrombie & Fitch. I would always go in and try to see if they would let me work there because I wanted a normal job. I did get a job for a week and a half at one in the Glendale Galleria. I sold shirts, learned how to fold. But I was let go because there was a big line of people who wanted me to sign stuff, and they were like, ‘This is not functioning as an Abercrombie & Fitch.’” She laughs, leading me down the hot sidewalk. “My friends and I used to go to Cinnabon, which is over in this direction. At that time, I could eat carbs and they didn’t land on my body. Now, I’m in my 40s.”
Hewitt, 46, has been working consistently since she was 10, getting her start in Barbie commercials and then on the variety show Kids Incorporated. Although she has spent most of the past decade or so on network television (she currently stars as dispatcher Maddie on Ryan Murphy’s 9-1-1), she’s about to make her cinematic comeback in a reboot of the franchise that launched her movie career in 1997, when she was 18. In the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, from writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Hewitt returns as the inordinately traumatized Julie James, whose infamous postgraduation cliffside car accident set off a chain of events that resulted in a middle-aged man in fishing attire murdering all her friends and loved ones across two whole movies.
Julie is now 27 years older and wiser, a professor who lectures her students on PTSD and accuses the hometown cops of “gaslighting” their constituents. She’s still considerably scarred by the events of her past, which included finding the body of her best friend (Sarah Michelle Gellar) buried in ice and nearly being burned alive in a tanning bed in the Bahamas. Professor James has been minding her own business until another group of attractive young adults (Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Sarah Pidgeon, Tyriq Withers, and Jonah Hauer-King) accidentally kills a guy on the very same cliff in a very similar manner and begins getting vengefully fishhooked. Sui Wonders’s Ava tracks down Julie at her place of work and begs for her help. At first, Hewitt, who returns alongside Freddie Prinze Jr., among others, wasn’t sure she wanted to go back. “All of my friends had to talk me into it,” she says. “Literally up until the last night before shooting, they were like, ‘You know you’re going tomorrow, right?’” I ask what made her so anxious, and she answers matter-of-factly: “What people were going to say about how much older I would seem than when I was 18. That’s literally the only thing I was anxious about.”
Hewitt is one of a handful of three-named, Neutrogena-splashed stars (Prinze Jr., Gellar, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Rachael Leigh Cook, Melissa Joan Hart) who rose to fame in the 1990s and enjoyed a brief moment of semi-harmless, Teen People–flavored celebrity attention. That is, until the early aughts, when Perez Hilton and his ilk transformed being famous into a blood sport featuring the public, the paparazzi, and their primarily female prey. By then, Hewitt was beloved both on TV (as a Party of Five series regular and then on her character’s short-lived spinoff, Time of Your Life) and in film (the I Know What You Did Last Summers, Can’t Hardly Wait, Heartbreakers), and she caught some of the worst of it. Reading her old press clips, in which men and women alike refer glibly or grossly to her breasts, is like entering a cursed Y2K-hole where “MMMBop” is playing on loop and Carson Daly won’t stop laughing at you.
Hewitt says she recognized how much it had all messed with her head only a few years ago when she watched the documentary Framing Britney Spears, which covers, among other things, the misogynistic treatment the singer received from the media and the public. “When I started watching it, I was like, Oh, they talked to me like that. Oh,” Hewitt says. “I started crying for her. And then I realized I was crying for me.”
Photo: Amanda Demme for New York Magazine
Hewitt was discovered at age 8 by a talent scout while singing in a pig barn in her hometown of Waco, Texas. Soon thereafter, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting full time with the support of her late mother, Patricia Hewitt. As a child, Jennifer possessed a near-maniacal poise and charm, the sort of jazz-hand confidence you’re either born with or not. “I just had blind faith in myself,” she says with a shrug. “I highly recommend it.” I ask if she still feels that way. “No,” she says, not unhappily. The older she got, the more she began second-guessing herself. On the North Carolina set of the first I Know What You Did Last Summer, she says, “I was in my head the whole time thinking, Do not screw this up.” It didn’t help that she hated horror movies. Prinze gave her a watch list to prepare: The Omen, Pet Sematary. She couldn’t make it through them. “We were in a town of fishermen, so I would run from a fisherman all night and then I’d be getting coffee the next morning and be like, That’s the damn fisherman right there,” she says. She was nervous, too, to act alongside Gellar, who was a couple of years older and already on the rise for Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “I was like, Okay, I have to watch how she’s comfortable, and I’m going to sit like that. Inside, I was like, I am dying.”
None of this is apparent in her performance, which is raw and earnest and appropriately tormented. Hewitt was originally meant to audition for Gellar’s role as the shallow beauty queen, but “I just didn’t feel like that person,” she says. “I was frustrated in my audition because I knew I wasn’t doing a great job.” She asked to audition for Julie instead, and the casting directors asked why. “I said, ‘I get the realness of somebody who has the worst thing imaginable happen and carries that pain with them so deeply.’” As she does in many of her early roles, Hewitt imbues Julie with a sort of angsty intelligence and a flinty frustration about the way everyone seems to underestimate her. In the movie’s first scene, Julie watches from the audience as Gellar’s Helen traipses across the stage at a small-town beauty pageant, listening to Prinze’s and Ryan Phillippe’s characters audibly ogle her. “I’m on sexist overload as it is,” Julie protests, rolling her eyes.
We’ve waited patiently for Wetzel’s Pretzels to open, and now we’re sitting at the food court sipping gigantic lemonades, our hands coated in salt and butter. “A worth-it carb,” Hewitt declares. Our conversation turns to the resulting press for the film. It’s more difficult to find a clip from Hewitt’s past that doesn’t mention her body than one that does and often in a way that otherwise disparages her. Here’s just one example, from Tamara Ikenberg in the Baltimore Sun: “It is not clear, exactly, what Jennifer Love Hewitt can do besides inspire legions of boys to glance glandularly at the I Know What You Did Last Summer movie poster, which features Love in a rather cozy tank top.” Another, the same year, from Frazier Moore of the AP: “It is hard to explain how you feel in the company of Jennifer Love Hewitt. But here goes. Just taking lunch with her, you feel a little like a dirty old man. Not because she’s 20 and charming and you’re old enough to be her father. But because you’re an adult and she’s so fresh-faced, sparkling and childlike. Yet you know darn well she’s not a child.” And from a Fort Worth Star-Telegram review of the sequel: “Hewitt does have some things going for her, none of which have much to do with acting. She is, however, one of the all-time screamers in movie history, as this movie frequently reminds us. She also has that face — and let’s be honest — that body, which the movie finds an excuse to clad in a bikini.”
“It bothers me more now than it did at that age because I was in it,” says Hewitt. “Before I even knew what sex was, I was a sex symbol. I still don’t know that I have that fully defined for myself because it started so weird.” She’d had a sheltered upbringing; Hewitt’s mother was highly protective of her, accompanying her daughter to every set and managing her career. But the two didn’t talk about the body stuff, something Hewitt wonders about now. “What was she going to say? ‘Sorry they keep talking about your …’ over dinner?” She feels worse, she says, for her mother. “What must it have been like to be a mom sitting inches from me, hearing people talk about that stuff and not being able to …”
Shielding Hewitt from the various pitfalls of fame got considerably more difficult in the early aughts. Where fans once felt sated by, say, red-carpet premiere photos, the rapidly devolving dialogue of the internet made the public ravenous for up-skirt shots at Les Deux. “All of a sudden, the pictures were of actresses stumbling out of clubs drunk,” Hewitt remembers. “It was them at the grocery store looking terrible. It opened this very scary door.” She says she assiduously avoided partying, spending her time off set touring the town with her mom. Most nights, she was in bed by 10 p.m. She didn’t have a sip of alcohol until she was 25 (a glass of Champagne, also with her mother). And those friends she wandered CityWalk with? Mostly people her age who weren’t famous or older crew members from her films.
While doing movie publicity, Hewitt tried to turn the unwanted attention on her body into a joke. “I was known as ‘the girl who laughed her way through The Tonight Show.’ I just couldn’t stop laughing,” she says, referring to her 1996 appearance at age 16. “I was trying to be like, I’m not overly sexy! I’m a nerd! I’ve referred to myself a lot as a dork, and I wasn’t aware of it at that time but, looking back, that was my way of saying, ‘That’s not me.’” On the show, Jay Leno asks Hewitt about her love life; he asks her how old she is. When she replies, he looks disappointedly at the audience, then asks when she’ll turn 17.
“I don’t put blame on the people asking those questions,” Hewitt continues. “Nobody was saying, ‘Don’t talk to women like that. Don’t talk to little girls like that.’ But I worked hard on that movie. I brought good stuff to it, and no one was talking about it. It was just ‘Boob, boob, boob’ everywhere. I didn’t just show up to wear the little blue top and run around.” She’s referring to her iconic wardrobe moment from the first film: a low-cut blue crop top and matching cardigan worn as she runs endlessly for her life. “I remember seeing the top for the first time and I was like, ‘This is a small shirt. What’s happening here? We’re just going to let it fly?’ Okay, great. Here we go. Running again. There they go! Bouncy-bounce! ” she says. At the Australian press junket for the first I Know What You Did Last Summer, she wore a T-shirt that said “Silicone-free.” “I was like, I’ve had it. I wore that shirt, and I felt so empowered,” she says. “And then, of course, nobody cared. I really wanted to be a good actor, and I was trying to give to the people watching. I was trying to outact the conversation around my body.”
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Those efforts didn’t go entirely unnoticed. Her film career flourished for a while: There was 1998’s Can’t Hardly Wait, in which she plays the secretly sensitive cool girl Amanda Beckett, and 2001’s mom-and-daughter scammer comedy Heartbreakers, alongside Sigourney Weaver. Hewitt is particularly good in the latter. She holds her own opposite Weaver, Gene Hackman, and Ray Liotta in a role that requires physical comedy and emotional range — and a lot of bandage dresses. “We showed up on my wardrobe day, and literally every single thing I wore in the movie was in a Ziploc bag. My mom was like, ‘What is that?’ And they were like, ‘These are her clothes,’” recalls Hewitt. She felt simultaneously lucky to get the part opposite some of her acting heroes and concerned that it would keep her pigeonholed. “There was a part of that movie that made me uncomfortable because I was like, This is going to open up this whole thing again.”
Hewitt knew that continuing to act required her to lean at least partly into a sort of willing objectification. In retrospect, Heartbreakers functions as a commentary on all of it. As Page, Hewitt is taught by her mother that her beauty is her only asset and learns to trade on it to seduce idiotic rich men and separate them from their money to rapidly diminishing returns. Hewitt had a hard time finding the right tone for her character’s cartoonish sexuality — blowing Liotta underneath a desk or wearing a French maid’s outfit and rubbing Hackman’s lap. “When I got to be the goofy side of her or the vulnerable side of her, that was when I felt like her,” she says.
When I ask what she’s most proud of from that period in her career, she struggles to think of something specific. “I wasn’t really offered anything other than the stuff,” she trails off. “I mean, The Tuxedo wasn’t overly sexy; that was me being goofy.” In that critically panned 2002 comedy, Hewitt plays a scientist sidekick to Jackie Chan. “It didn’t do as well because I wasn’t what people wanted me to be.” Hewitt seemed primed for scream-queen status, but she wasn’t offered another horror movie — she says she would have jumped at the chance. A TV-movie role as Audrey Hepburn debuted to mixed reviews, and a series of poorly performing indies followed in the decade thereafter. “Garfield was hilarious,” she recalls, referring to the 2004 film in which she plays the cat’s vet. It was a critical flop but a massive box-office success. “Even in that, they stuck me in skintight outfits. But that one was more for me. I’ve gotten to show my kids that movie, so I’m happy I did it.”
Something shifted permanently for Hewitt in 2007 when she went on vacation to Hawaii with her then-fiancé, Ross McCall, and woke up to paparazzi photos of her frolicking and smiling in the ocean in a bikini. People magazine ran the photos as a cover story with the headline “Stop Calling Me Fat!” Hewitt remembers what she was doing in the exact moment the photos were taken. “I was having the time of my life,” she says. “I had made up the dumbest song about eating snacks and playing in the ocean, and I was singing it to my boyfriend out loud, doing some weird dance move, and they got the picture and then it was on the cover.” She was devastated. “I don’t think I was ever really insecure until that cover. And then when it happened, I don’t know that I’ve ever recovered from it,” she says. “Because there’s a part of me that’s always like, Is this version going to be good enough, or is that going to happen again? Where somebody’s going to be like, ‘Hey, this is her without makeup at the cleaners. She looks 59.’”
Hewitt wonders aloud why that moment, out of countless others over the years, was so traumatizing. She pauses to sip her lemonade. “Because that was me,” she says. “I think that’s why the insecurity carried on. I don’t know if I’ve even ever put that together for myself other than right now.” She laughs despite herself. “It’s the pretzel. The pretzel is helping. I think I was like, Oh my God, I was myself one time, and this is what happened.” Her mother comforted her at the time by pointing out something she had never quite realized. “She was like, ‘You don’t get it. You can’t win. This is just people having a problem with the version of you they think belongs to them.’ And she said, ‘Take your power back. Belong to yourself, and don’t worry about it.’”
It took Hewitt years to figure out how to do that. In 2012, she met her now-husband, actor Brian Hallisay, on the set of Lifetime’s The Client List. She lost her mother the same year and had never felt alone in Hollywood until then. “We were together so much that when she passed, I was like, ‘Now I’m lonely. I don’t know what to do without her,’” she says. Hewitt took a beat to “understand how to move on without her.” She turned her attention to TV, which felt more solid and reliable than film — she had starring roles on Criminal Minds and Ghost Whisperer, among other shows, and more recently directed and starred in a Lifetime Christmas movie, The Holiday Junkie. She took considerable breaks from working to have three children: Autumn, now 11; Atticus, 10; and Aidan, 3. In 2018, she got wind of Ryan Murphy wanting a “Jennifer Love Hewitt type” for 9-1-1. “I was like, ‘I am sort of a Jennifer Love Hewitt type,’” she says.
Hewitt’s character, Maddie, is put through the wringer so often on the show that there are Reddit threads about it — getting her throat slit, getting kidnapped, getting chained to a basement floor. It’s the role Hewitt feels the proudest of. “I get to be, not ugly, but raw in a way that doesn’t matter. I get to put all those little things into her that maybe I didn’t notice or get to pay attention to along the way and heal them,” she says. “Like that day the People cover came out. I give that to Maddie constantly.” In her estimation, 9-1-1 marks the first time in her career since Party of Five that people are talking more about her performance than how she looks. “It was the work and then it was the body. And not the body of work,” she says. “Now we’re getting back to the work part of it.”
I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997. Photo: Columbia Pictures
I Know What You Did Last Summer, 2025. Photo: Matt Kennedy
Hewitt didn’t know about the I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot until she read about it online in 2023. “A publicist friend of mine was like, ‘Congratulations.’ And I was like, ‘What is going on?’” she says. “I went on Deadline, and all it said was ‘Jennifer and Freddie might come back.’ I was like, ‘I hope this is not an embarrassing thing where they never ask us back.’”
She got the official call from Robinson soon after. “It took me a long time to say ‘yes’ because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t coming back and playing the wrong version of Julie,” Hewitt says. “Jenn fought to make sure Julie was exactly who we wanted her to be.” To Robinson, that meant giving Hewitt a lot of leverage. “When you’re a young woman and you step into something that becomes iconic,” Robinson says, “and you don’t have any control over that thing — I wanted her to feel the opposite with this movie.” Neither of them wanted to see a version of Julie who was “kick-ass and has no trauma left.” The resulting character is “really me and old Julie put together,” says Hewitt. “A person who’s proud to carry vulnerability and some trauma from things in life as she navigates the world with strength.” Hewitt’s nonnegotiable was that Julie wouldn’t die, and the new I Know What You Did Last Summer ends in a way that suggests a sequel is possible. That’s “the goal and the hope,” she says.
While fans celebrated Hewitt’s return to I Know What You Did Last Summer, it was accompanied by some early-aughts-style drama in the press. Perez Hilton, among others, suggested Hewitt and Gellar were still engaged in an undefined, decadeslong feud after Gellar dodged questions about Hewitt on a red carpet and excluded her from an Instagram Story about the film. On the subject of Gellar, Hewitt turns uncharacteristically vague. “I honestly don’t even know what that was or how that all came to be,” she says. “I just think people don’t want the narrative to be easy. Why do we always have to be against each other and out for each other?” I ask if she has talked to Gellar about any of it. “I haven’t seen Sarah,” she says. “Literally, we’ve not talked since I saw her at 18 years old when the first movie came out. That’s why it’s so funny to me. People were like, ‘Say something back.’ And I’m like, ‘What am I going to say? I’ve not seen her.’ On my side, we’re good. I have no idea where this is coming from.” I suggest that maybe they’ll see each other at the premiere. “I hope so,” says Hewitt. (Later, after the premiere, Gellar addressed the rumors again after the actresses didn’t appear in red-carpet photos together. “For everyone asking – I never got to see @jenniferlovehewitt, who is fantastic in the movie,” she wrote on Instagram. “I was inside with my kids when the big carpet happened. And unfortunately JLH didn’t come to the after party.”)
Hewitt feels a sense of pride, she says, about having been in the business now for three-plus decades alongside many of her peers — all the ’90s three-namers. “There are people that blow up and are hugely famous,” she says, “and then there are those little warriors from the ’90s who just keep going. I secretly root for all those people. We’re steady little racehorses, and you can’t get rid of us. We’re a special breed.”
As we head back to the parking garage, Hewitt tells me about how she, her stylist, and Robinson worked together to come up with a look for Julie that felt right — sexy but not sexualized, in vintage T-shirts and blazers and jeans. “It was very healing,” says Hewitt. “Nobody’s going to be talking about my boobs. ‘Oh, you want me to flash you? They’re down here.’” She does wear one slightly lower-cut shirt “just to give some cleavage,” she says. “We were like, ‘Well, we’re back. Why not?’” On the phone later, Robinson gets riled up about the topic. “We cannot let men take away the fact that she is hot because they wanted to make it their thing,” she says. “We have to reclaim Jennifer Love Hewitt being hot for us!”
Among the new cast, Sui Wonders’s Ava is the most direct Julie James avatar: the brainy brunette with a haunted look in her eyes and an inexplicable, undying lust for her high-school boyfriend. Hewitt found herself feeling protective of Sui Wonders, advising her on how to navigate being pursued by men with (proverbial) fishhooks. Working with her also reminded Hewitt of her time on the set of Heartbreakers. “There was a moment when we were talking about being the ingénue and then realizing you’re not the young girl on the set anymore — you’re the older version of that girl,” recalls Hewitt. “Sigourney was like, ‘You’re going to look back and you’re going to remember that, right now, you’re the ingénue and then you’re going to pass that baton to somebody.’” On Hewitt’s second day on the I Know What You Did Last Summer set, she told Sui Wonders, “I’m having this moment, and I’ve got to tell you about it. In my mind, I still feel like I am the ingénue, but I’m not. And I just realized that I’m here to be okay with that.” She told Sui Wonders to give her a call when she reaches that moment in her own career.
Production Credits
- Photographs by Amanda Demme
- Styling by Alayna Bell-Price
- Hair by Maxine Morris
- Makeup by Rebecca Alling
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