NEED TO KNOW
Freddie Prinze Jr. is “really proud” of his I Know What You Did Last Summer return with costar Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Prinze, now 49, reprises his role as Ray Bronson in the new installment, directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and Hewitt, 46, is back as Julie James, now a trauma professor.
The costars first embodied the roles in 1997’s hit slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer, alongside Ryan Phillippe and Prinze’s now-wife Sarah Michelle Gellar.
“Whatever a high school union feels like, that’s what it felt like,” Prinze tells PEOPLE about reuniting with Hewitt in their decades-old roles. “You have no idea what’s changed, what’s the same. You’re excited to show what you think you’re better at, you know what I mean? You hope they notice it. It was all those things.”
Because of a tight filming schedule, “there just had to be trust that each of us cared enough to put the work in,” he says. “I didn’t have any reason not to trust her. I know how much this character means to her. She puts everything into this girl and always has since the first movie.”
Brook Rushton/Columbia Pictures
Prinze thinks his work with Hewitt in this new sequel is their best yet together. “I know when we got together, they’re the best scenes that we’ve put on camera together, of any of the three movies.” (He says in an aside, “I know there was another one in there, but I never saw that one,” referring to the 2006 sequel they weren’t in, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer.)
He reiterates, “I’m really proud of the work that Love and I got to do on screen. I think it’s the best work we’ve done in all three of the movies that we did together. And I don’t think it’s close.”
Hewitt previously told PEOPLE that seeing Prinze again on set “felt like a high school reunion,” and shared, “It felt like that moment where you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have butterflies in my stomach and my heart is beating really fast because I have not seen this person in 150 years and now we’re back, here we are.’ ”
She added, “We just had to jump right back into Julie and Ray, but when we did it felt like we had never left, honestly.”
Matt Kennedy/Columbia Pictures
During a subsequent interview, Hewitt said she and Prinze snapped back into their characters’ shoes “in seconds” and “it felt great.” She adds, “Freddie is really great in this movie. It was fun to watch.”
Robinson says it was a “crazy, out-of-body experience” directing scenes with Hewitt and Prinze. “They’re both so lovely, and I really can’t understate this, so hot. They’re so hot!” says the director. “It felt exciting on set, and I think it feels exciting onscreen.”
Columbia/courtesy Everett
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In the new Last Summer, a group of twenty-somethings (Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Sarah Pidgeon, Jonah Hauer-King and Tyriq Withers) cause a deadly car accident in Southport, North Carolina, and they flee the scene. A year later, a killer in a fisherman’s slicker is out for revenge — sound familiar? — so the panicked friends consult two survivors of the ’97 massacre for help: Julie and Ray.
“I love what they’ve done with Ray,” says Prinze, poiting out that his involvement is “not a cameo” or a “one-scene thing.” He says Robinson and co-writer Sam Lansky “put so much time into Ray and Julie, and they’re such a driving force in this film that people will get what they’re looking for out of these characters.”
As teased in the latest trailer, Hewitt gets to deliver her iconic “What are you waiting for?” line once again. It was “so fun” to do, she says.
“The night before, it was very nerve-wracking trying to figure out how can I say it this time. I get to say it in very different way. It was one of the very first things that Jen and I wholeheartedly agreed on. We were like, ‘We have to say it again. It has to be in there. If we could do it more than once, great.’ When that trailer came out, I got so many messages from people being like, ‘That sounds so good!’ ”
I Know What You Did Last Summer is in theaters July 18.
