Jennifer Love Hewitt is looking back on some of the “mind blowing” comments that she received after her star-making turn in I Know What You Did Last Summer and opening up about processing her sex symbol status as a teenage star.
Hewitt was 16 when she played Julie James in the 1997 slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer, but the project’s success did not prepare her for the reactions that she received from adults while she was promoting the movie.
The 45-year-old recently appeared on Mayim Bialik’s podcast Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast where she discussed her experience, sharing that she only recently recognized just how inappropriate grown men were towards her at the time.
“When I Know What You Did Last Summer came out, everybody said, ‘Oh, I know what your breasts did last summer,’” recalled Hewitt. “There were grown men talking to me at 16 about my breasts openly on a talk show, and people were laughing about it. It was a culture that was fully accepted. But when you sit and look at where we are now versus then, it is really mind blowing.”
Hewitt said to Bialik that she had actually forgotten about the inappropriate comments until roughly a decade ago when she went back and looked at some footage. “I didn’t remember that,” she said. “I really didn’t take that part of it in. But in hindsight, it was very strange to become a sex symbol for people before I even knew what that was. I didn’t know what being ‘sexy’ meant, and I was on the cover of Maxim magazine. People would walk up and be like, ‘Oh, I took your magazine with me on a trip last week,’ and I didn’t really know what that meant. It’s kind of gross.”
Hewitt credited her mother for keeping her grounded and relatively sheltered.
“At the time, it felt very innocent and exciting and fun,” Hewitt recalled. “I’m thankful for that because I think had I tried to take on some of that earlier, I think it would have messed with me a little bit, but it didn’t. Maybe because my mom was always around keeping reality very apparent for me. I would go to a premiere, and people would want me to [attend parties], and I’d have to go home and clean my room.”
Hewitt also said that her mom kept her grateful for the opportunity provided by the film.
“I remember thinking it was really cool that the girls looked up to me, and I took that very seriously,” she said. “That was the part that I took away from it at the time. I felt a real responsibility to carry myself in a way that felt like I was earning the right to be somebody’s role model. I remember having a really interesting conversation with my mom where [she said] there were probably 50,000 other girls in the world that didn’t get the opportunity that I did, and that I had to take care of it.”
Hewitt is set to revisit her character from I Know What You Did Last Summer in this year’s reboot, also titled I Know What You Did Last Summer, from director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. The film is set to be released on July 18, 2025.
