The I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot came out in theaters this past weekend. It features a whole new group of young actors being stalked by a man with a fishhook, with original series stars Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. back to reprise their roles. For J.Love, this actually marks her first live-action film role since 2012. (She currently stars in the Ryan Murphy series, 9-1-1.) Last week, Jennifer made headlines for her appearance at the movie’s LA premiere because trolls decided to point out that she looks like a normal, beautiful woman in her 40s.
J.Love recently sat down with NY Mag. She said that she almost didn’t do the film, mainly beccause of the why the press has always covered her body. She also described just how awful it was to live through the early aughts when everyone had an opinion on her body. You can read the interview here and here are some highlights:
She was worried about people commenting on her appearance: At first, Hewitt…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.”
When fame became a ‘blood sport’: 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…and in film…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.
The Britney documentary was eye-opening: 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. I started crying for her. And then I realized I was crying for me.”
The super gross coverage she used to get: 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.”
That gross Jay Leno interview: 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.
That 2007 People cover of her in a bikini on the beach: “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…’”
“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…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.’”
I feel terrible for what Jennifer went through. I can absolutely see how the Britney doc could have been a wake-up call for J.Love and all of the stars from that era. They all went through some things. The way that people, especially adult men, felt like they could objectify her is sickening. I completely understand why she would be hesitant to put herself out there again and invite comparisons about her teenage body vs her now. That is an uneven playing field!
The negative opinions over Jennifer’s red carpet appearance were also very dumb because she looked gorgeous and confident. I’m glad that Jennifer’s found ways to protect her mental health and overall peace, and I’m so grateful that she put herself out there. I sincerely hope that she can ignore the noise and continue being the bad-ass icon that Gen X/Millennials know her to be.
Photos credit: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Avalon and via Instagram/NY Magazine