Jennifer Love Hewitt is looking back at the highs and lows of her Hollywood career, which skyrocketed when she was just a teen. Hewitt, best known for her roles in Ghost Whisperer, 9-1-1 and I Know What You Did Last Summer, got candid about the very negative reality that came with fame at a young age — including unwelcome attention to her looks.
While chatting with Mayim Bialik on her Breakdown podcast, Hewitt said she was objectified by adult men when she was just 16 years old. The actress was 18 when I Know What You Did Last Summer debuted in 1997, but got her start in the business back in 1989 with the children’s show Kids Incorporated.
“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,” Hewitt recalled. “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 said that at the time, “It was a culture that was fully accepted. They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate,” so she played along, saying, “I answered the questions, laughed right along with them.”
The actress said she was so young at the time she didn’t even fully understand what was happening, admitting, “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.”
About a decade later, it all stared to feel different, Hewitt told Bialik. In her 30s, she began to reflect more on her late teens years.
“I sort of went back and looked at that time again and I was like, ‘Oh my God,'” Hewitt said. “There were grown men talking to me at 16 about my breasts just openly on a talk show, and people were laughing about it.”
Hewitt told Bialik that one recent release in particular made her look back on her past differently. The 9-1-1 star said she felt a “light bulb” moment while watching the Britney Spears documentary, although she did not specify which one (there have been multiple recent releases about Spears, including Britney vs. Spears and Britney: For the Records, but Framing Britney Spears was arguably the most buzzy of the bunch, and likely what Hewitt was referencing).
“When I watched the Britney Spears documentary, that was really honestly the light bulb for me. When I watched it, I finished watching it, and my husband was like, ‘Why do you look so disturbed?'” Hewitt said. “I was like, ‘I know what that feels like.’ I know sitting there and being asked those questions and it never dawned on me that it was inappropriate.”
Hewitt is not shy when it comes to exposing her life as a Hollywood starlet. She recently told Michael Rosenbaum on his Inside of You podcast that the Heartbreakers director David Mirkin told her she needed “to be sexier” while filming the 2001 romantic crime comedy when she was 23.
“I had to pull him aside and be like, ‘I don’t know what that means. I’m only 23,’” she said in late 2023. “I know that I’m supposed to be this thing for people, but I don’t know what that means. And he had to like help me figure that out.”