What Convinced Freddie Prinze Jr. to Return to ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer'
The new film follows five friends who inadvertently cause a deadly car accident and cover it up, then a year later a stalker sends them taunting messages about their crime. Realizing that the stalker is imitating a famous serial killer, the group seeks help from the two survivors of the Southport massacre of 1997, in Prinze and Hewitt's characters.
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At the Los Angeles premiere on Monday, Prinze told The Hollywood Reporter that he would usually have been hesitant to return to the franchise, but he was friends with director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson beforehand and was impressed by her 2022 film Do Revenge.
'She said, 'Look, I know you're going to pass, but let me just pitch you my version of this and let you see my vision and let's see if you dig it.' So it started by just telling me where these characters were at all these years later and how they dealt with this traumatic event and I liked that, and then she pitched me this wild vision that she had for the movie and I fell in love with it,' the actor recalled. 'I told her, 'Yo, I'm your guy' before they even wrote a script. I was like, 'I know it's going to work out, you and [writer] Sam [Lansky] will write a great script, she's a great writer anyway. I was like, 'You guys will write a great script but I'm in and we'll make everything work.' It was pretty easy once I heard the idea.'
Prinze walked the carpet with wife Sarah Michelle Gellar, who also co-starred in the original film but did not return for the 2025 version as her character had died. He joked about coming back without his spouse, 'I don't think she cared — that's not a F.O.M.O. thing, she's not insecure like that.'
The star also admitted that he doesn't 'see much of what I do [but] I've seen this movie; I really love it, I'm really proud of it, I'm grateful to be in it. I'm grateful to see Jen's vision from beginning to end in a studio movie, which is a harder way to make films these days because the notes are kind of crazy. But she was able to circumnavigate all of those speed bumps and maintain her vision, preproduction to postproduction to tonight, and I'm really proud and excited to see it again with all of these people.'
In addition to the veteran actors, the new friend group is composed of Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers and Sarah Pidgeon.
Cline — who is currently filming the final season of Outer Banks — noted that she grew up in South Carolina and 'everybody loves I Know What You Did Last Summer. And also, it's funny because some of our crew and our production also worked on the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, so we're all big fans, it's a legacy film. It's iconic — it's very, very cool to be passed the baton and have their blessing.'
I Know What You Did Last Summer hits theaters on Friday.
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