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Jennifer Love Hewitt reflects on her former teen idol status.
After her breakout role on Fox’s teen drama Party of Five in season 2 as Sarah Reeves in 1995, the actress cemented her popularity two years later when she landed the role of final girl Julie James in I know what you did last summer.
As her star continued to rise in her teens and twenties, viewers began to see Hewitt as a sex symbol, the implications of which she didn’t fully understand at the time.
“I didn’t really know what was happening,” Hewitt tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue, on newsstands Friday. “I was quite innocent and didn’t really know anything about my sexuality, but I was still on the cover of Maxim. I just went along. I just knew as I went along, the outfits on the photo shoots got smaller, and I knew my brother was more concerned, and my mom was like, ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’ Now I look back and say, ‘That’s intense.'”
As I look to 2021 New York Times-Hulu documentary Framing Britney Spears, Hewitt says she could identify with much of what the pop star has experienced in the public eye.
“She said people always talked about her breasts, and you look back at the interviews and the questions I was asked as a kid, and it’s crazy,” Hewitt says. “The things people were allowed to say to you in an interview were absolutely wild. Now I would say, ‘Sir, no thank you. That’s not a question that’s going to be answered this afternoon.’ But at the time you had to answer or laugh it off.”
If she could give her 18-year-old self any advice, Hewitt says she would tell her, “You don’t have to be sexy.”
“I would tell her to calm down, that she will still be here at 45,” she adds. “I think that’s what I panicked about the most when I was 18. It was like, ‘How long is this going to take?’ Now, at 45, I said to that girl, ‘We’re going to be here for a while.'”
It’s certainly been a busy year for Hewitt, who recently released her book Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Sadness, Joy, Celebration, and Making Every Day Magical And has her new Lifetime Christmas movie The holiday junkie premieres on Saturday, December 14. She also stars in the TV drama 9-1-1 as 9-1-1 coordinator Maddie Han since 2018.
As she gets older, Hewitt – who shares daughter Autumn, 11, and sons Atticus, 9, and Aidan, 3, with husband Brian Hallisay46 — says it has become easier for her to say “no” at work.
“I mean, now I have to say no to certain things because of my kids,” she says. “I also don’t involve myself in things that would be embarrassing or harmful to them. I have to be a mother first and an actress second. I want my children to feel like they come first in our little world.”
In 2025, Hewitt will follow new dreams, including expanding “Holiday Junkie” into a full-fledged brand. She is also looking at a return in the near future I know what you did last summer restart.
In the meantime, she takes stock of everything she has achieved over the past year.
“When I sat down with my 2024 vision board, this is what I wanted,” she says. “I wanted all these things to happen, and I wanted to end the year feeling like the ‘Holiday Junkie’ brand is coming. I can be a mom and the person people have known me to be for a long time, but shift it to a way for them both to come together. So I feel very excited and super grateful.
The holiday junkie premieres Saturday, December 14 at 8pm ET on Lifetime.
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