Jennifer Love Hewitt Recalls Being Sexualized As A Teen: ‘I Didn’t Know What Being Sexy Meant’

Jennifer Love Hewitt discussed being sexualized when she was a teenage actress working in Hollywood, saying she didn’t fully understand what it meant to be a sex symbol at the time.

The 45-year-old actress made the remarks during a recent episode of Mayim Bialik’s “Breakdown” podcast.

“In my 30s, I sort of went back and looked at that time again and I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Hewitt said during the episode. “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’s career took off when she was cast as Sarah Reeves Merrin on the Fox teen drama Party of Five (1995–1999). She was 18 when the massively popular teen horror movie “I Know What You Did Last Summer” was released in 1997. 

“In hindsight, it was really strange, I think, to become a sex symbol sort of like before I even knew what that was,” she continued. “I didn’t know what being sexy meant.”

The actress continued, “I was on the cover of Maxim magazines, and people would openly walk up and be like, ‘I took your magazine with me on a trip last week.’ I didn’t know what that meant, you know what I mean? It’s kind of gross. I think later it sort of hit me more… but at the time, it felt very innocent and exciting and fun.”

Later in the conversation, Hewitt recalled some of the jokes made after “I Know What You Did Last Summer” was released. 

“After the movie came out, everybody said, ‘Oh, I know what your breasts did last summer’ and that was the joke,” she told Bialik, per Page Six. “Everybody would laugh, and so I would laugh, ’cause it was supposed to be funny, I guess. It didn’t register with me that this was a grown man, talking about my breasts on national television.”

The actress said she doesn’t blame the people making jokes, explaining that it was standard procedure then. 

“It was a culture that was fully accepted. They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate, and I answered the questions, laughed right along with them,” she said.

Hewitt said she was embarrassed by her figure and wore baggy clothing to hide it. “I had bigger boobs for a smaller person, and so it was embarrassing. I didn’t want to be looked at by a 40-year-old in Pizza Hut,” she said. Hewitt also recalled being “so mad” that she was only noticed for her looks in the film. 

“I had worked so hard trying to be good in a horror movie, and I really wanted people to walk away from the movie going, ‘That’s a really good actress,’” Hewitt said. “And instead, every headline — and I’m not even joking — for 10 or 12 years after that … it was always about my breasts, always first. …That was heartbreaking for me.”