Jennifer Love Hewitt Reveals Troubling Details About Her Past

Jennifer Love Hewitt was one of the most iconic stars of the late '90s and early 2000s. A prolific actor, Hewitt became a household name as a member of the ensemble show Party of Five and the lead actor in the slasher flicks I Know What You Did Last Summer and its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. She then made mainstream success with 2001's Heartbreakers, where she got the opportunity to act alongside Sigourney Weaver, Gene Hackman, and Ray Liotta, among others. Ahead of that movie's 20th anniversary this year, Vulture had a conversation with Hewitt about the film's cult classic status and the conversations she had in interviews at the time.

Those who are familiar with the film know that Hewitt's character of Page Conners spent most of the movie running around in tight, tube-top dresses and stiletto heels. "When I walked in for my first fitting, I thought all the dresses were tops and didn't know where the bottoms were. I remember watching them unpack some of my things, and they were in ziplock bags, and I was like 'My clothes ... are in there?' And we all had a really big laugh about the fact that I just wore tiny clothes the whole movie," she told Vulture.

But while she and the rest of the film's crew might have had a laugh over what she wore, upon further reflection, Hewitt has come to realize her outfits led to some very inappropriate questions.

Although Jennifer Love Hewitt is quite talented, like many women thrust into the spotlight in the early 2000s, her skills were often overshadowed by her looks. She shared that she watched the Britney Spears documentary Framing Britney Spears and that brought a lot of painful memories to mind.

"There's that whole section in [Framing Britney Spears] talking about [Spears'] breasts. At the time that I was going through it, and interviewers were asking what now would be incredibly inappropriate, gross things, it didn't feel that way," Hewitt explained to Vulture. "Now that I'm older, I think, 'Gosh, I wish that I had known how inappropriate that was so I could have defended myself somehow or just not answered those questions.'" 

She said the conversation about her body started during her press tours for I Know What You Did Last Summer and sometimes her body would outshine her acting. Particularly, she expressed how she wore a T-shirt to a press junket for either I Know What You Did Last Summer or its sequel that said "Silicone Free" because she was "so annoyed" by questions about her boobs. She also shared it was disheartening it was to do press for Heartbreakers and have the majority of questions be focused on her looks. "I was disappointed that it was all about body stuff, because I had really worked hard in that movie to do a good job as an actress," Hewitt recalled.