As a mother of three, Jennifer Love Hewitt is looking back at her teenage stardom in Hollywood with a fresh perspective.
The 45-year-old told Mayim Bialik on “Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown” podcast Tuesday that after she made “I Know What You Did Last Summer” in 1997, everyone became obsessed with her breasts.
“When ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ came out, everybody said, ‘Oh, I know what your breasts did last summer,’ and that was like the joke,” she said. “And, again, everybody would laugh, so I would laugh. It was supposed to be funny, I guess, right? Like it didn’t register with me that this is a grown man talking to me about my breasts on national television.”
Hewitt added that she doesn’t blame interviewers for asking her questions about her breasts or making jokes.
JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT SLAMS AGEISM IN HOLLYWOOD, SAYS ‘IT’S HURTFUL’ TO FEEL REJECTED
“It was a culture that was fully accepted. They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate, and I answered the questions, laughed right along with them.”
She said she didn’t take in the sexualization part of it at the time, “but in hindsight, it was really strange, I think, to become a sex symbol sort of like before I I even knew what that was. Like I didn’t know what being sexy meant.”
She said when she was in her 30s, she began to reevaluate her teen years in Hollywood.
“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 you look at where we are now versus then, it is really mind-blowing,” she said.
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She said fans would walk up to her and say, “I took your magazine with me on a trip last week,” and she’d feel she had to laugh with them about it, referring to her Maxim cover. “But I didn’t know what that meant, you know. It’s kind of gross.”
“So, I think later it sort of hit me more, the kind of things that I probably went through somewhere. But, at the time, it felt very innocent and exciting and fun,” she reflected.
She said her mother kept her grounded at the height of her fame and protected her from the party scene in Hollywood.
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“I think at the time it went so fast that I was like, ‘Woah, OK, I guess this means I get to stick around for a minute and do more jobs and, like, OK, this is fine.’ I remember thinking it was really cool that, like, girls looked up to me, and I took that really seriously,” she told Bialik.
“That was the part that I, like, took away from it all at the time. And I felt a real responsibility to carry that, carrying myself in a way that felt like I was earning the right to be somebody’s, like, role model.”
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She said “I Know What You Did Last Summer” marked the first time she wore outfits that showed off her body.
“And it became this thing,” she said. “I was so mad that I had done my first movie and I had worked so hard trying to be, like, good in a horror movie, and I really wanted people to walk away from the movie going, ‘That’s a really good actress.’
“And, instead, every headline, and I’m not even joking, for 10 or 12 years after that, before they ever mentioned anything about talent or if I had played a part of changed myself for a part or – it was always about my breasts, always first.
“That felt … it was just like, ‘Come on, I’m working so hard. I’m growing. I’m trying so hard, like crying from my heart week after week for you, and the only thing that you see is a movie poster with boobs on it. That was heartbreaking for me.”
