Though it was reported he and Jennifer Love Hewitt were in talks to return to the horror franchise, Prinze Jr. says he didn’t know anything about the movie until after his possible involvement made headlines.
Freddie Prinze Jr.’s potential return to the “I Know What You Did Last Summer” franchise was news to Freddie Prinze Jr.
Last month, it was reported that a new legacy sequel to the 1997 horror flick was in the works from director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and writer Leah McKendrick. Robinson recently worked with Prinze Jr.’s wife and fellow former IKWYDLS costar Sarah Michelle Gellar on the 2022 Netflix movie “Do Revenge.” Initial reports also said both Freddie and costar Jennifer Love Hewitt were “in talks” to reprise their roles as Ray Bronson and Julie James, respectively.
But when TooFab caught up with Freddie to talk about his new horror movie podcast That Was Pretty Scary — a show which launches with a discussion all about the original IKWYDLS — he said he didn’t know anything about the movie until after his possible involvement started making headlines.
Prinze Jr. believes the production company behind the film “leaked” the announcement in an attempt to “get people hyped about their movie.”
“I have been offered nothing, nothing. They just said that to get people excited. I haven’t spoken to anyone at their company, my agents haven’t received an offer from them whatsoever,” he continued. “I had a conversation with the director a few days after they announced that, just to be like, ‘Yo, what the hell? Why are they saying I’m going to be in a movie I’m probably not going to be in?’ And she said, ‘Let me pitch you the idea.’ So she’s spoken to me about the idea, but I haven’t said yes, I haven’t received an offer.”
“I have no reason to lie to anyone, I have no skin in the game. I’m only gonna do things that I like and work with people that I like and there’s not gonna be any wiggle room this time around,” he told TooFab. “I messed up the first time around, this time I just want to do stuff I’m passionate about.”
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The original movie was a massive success and spawned a sequel, “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,” as well as a direct-to-video movie and 2022 TV series with no connection to the previous films. Freddie said he hasn’t read a script for this latest attempt to revive the franchise, but opened up about what he would like to see in a new movie all these years later.
“I would want to see it definitely based in reality. I don’t think we need anything supernatural. I wouldn’t want to see someone come back to life,” he said. “I don’t like that, it just makes me think of old ’80s movies like ‘Soapdish‘ … that’s what it’d feel like for me if everybody came back fine or Ben Willis was like, ‘I’m back again, 20 years older, I can’t move that well, arthritis.’ Hopefully they find an organic and just base everything in reality.”
Gellar recently echoed some of those sentiments, saying there’s no way her character Helen Shivers would be back in the new movie. “As I explained to Jennifer, I am dead. I am dead dead. On ice,” she told ET, before also bringing up the “Soapdish” comparison.
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“The cool thing about ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ was you had four people feeling very differently about a horrible event. You had anger from [Ryan Phillippe’s Barry], you had guilt from [Hewitt], you had fear from Sarah and you had regret from me. That was all Kevin Williamson. That’s what made it special, it was four people reacting honestly, all four were relatable in a different way,” Freddie continued.
“I don’t know if they’re gonna have 4, 5, 10 kids, no kids, I don’t know what they’re gonna do. But hopefully it stays rooted in reality,” he added. “I think that’s the best way to do horror, or you have to fully commit to the Freddy Krueger of it all. Which is awesome, they’re my favorite movies, but they’re ridiculous. So you have to lean all the way into it or all the way out.”
With Freddie a maybe and Sarah an obvious no, Prinze Jr. added, “Maybe they’ll get Ms. Norwood [aka Brandy] in there.”
“They killed [I Still Know star Mekhi Phifer] right? They killed poor Jack Black, I can’t believe he killed the nicest guy in the world, Jack Black,” he added. “Only a couple of us lived, Brandy, Love and me, that’s it. No boys, I got both the girls!”
The first episode of Freddie and cohost Jon Lee Brody’s That Was Pretty Scary podcast is live for Wondery+ subscribers now and will be available to everyone else, wherever you listen to podcasts, on March 15.