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Jennifer Love Hewitt rose to fame in the late ’90s. That can be a bit of a mixed bag.
Though this has led to a lengthy career for the current 9-1-1 star, there were perhaps even more drawbacks to being a young, famous actress a quarter of a century ago than there are now.
Simply put, a lot of men are creeps towards teen girls. Back then, gross comments on her body were very normalized in the culture.
Hewitt is now a mom herself, and she’s had time to process how appalling the sexualization really was.
When Jennifer Love Hewitt became an actress, she didn’t intend to become a sex symbol
On Tuesday, January 28, Jennifer Love Hewitt spoke on the Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast about how deeply creepy people were to and about her when she first rose to stardom.
I Know What You Did Last Summer released in 1997. The slasher film came out at a time when our culture was even weirder about women’s bodies than it is now. And Hewitt was only a teenager.
Suddenly, people were treating her like a sex object. Not merely objectifying her behind her back — but speaking to her about 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,” Jennifer Love Hewitt recalled.
“And, again, everybody would laugh, so I would laugh,” she explained. “It was supposed to be funny, I guess, right?”
Hewitt admitted: “Like it didn’t register with me that this is a grown man talking to me about my breasts on national television.”
‘It was a culture that was fully accepted’
Sometimes, a person ends up with one creepy interviewer, by happenstance. That was not the case here. In the late ’90s, this misogynistic rot infested many aspects of our society. (People like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson had similar interviews during this bleak era)
“It was a culture that was fully accepted,” Jennifer Love Hewitt characterized. “They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate, and I answered the questions, laughed right along with them.”
To a degree, she didn’t fully process how much people were sexualizing her. Hewitt admitted: “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.”
Though Hewitt was not fully cognizant as a teen of how inappropriate these talks were, she saw this coverage in a new light when she entered her 30s.
“There were grown men talking to me at 16 about my breasts openly on a talk show, and people were laughing about it,” she remarked. “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.”
Hewitt recalled men who were “fans” of hers telling her that they’d taken her Maxim cover on a trip. She did not, at the time, realize that they were telling her to her face that they’d used her photos as masturbatory fuel.
Jennifer Love Hewitt liked being a role model
“So, I think later it sort of hit me more, the kind of things that I probably went through somewhere,” Jennifer Love Hewitt reflected. “But, at the time, it felt very innocent and exciting and fun.”
She added: “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.’”
Hewitt added: “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.”
Even at the time, Jennifer Love Hewitt did not appreciate that some very loud people cared more about her breasts than they did about her acting. Especially for a massive project like I Know What You Did Last Summer.
“And it became this thing,” she explained. “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.’”
Hewitt lamented: “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.”
It broke Jennifer Love Hewitt’s heart to have her work dismissed
“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,’” Hewitt lamented. “‘And the only thing that you see is a movie poster with boobs on it.’”
She expressed: “That was heartbreaking for me.”
This sort of thing does happen to teen actors, like Finn Wolfhard and Taylor Lautner. However, it too often happens to women. The one piece of good news is that society and the industry are slowly getting better about it.
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