IKWYDLS Director Says She ‘Harassed’ Sarah Michelle Gellar with ‘Crazy’ Pitches to Bring Her Back

The new I Know What You Did Last Summer features young friends played by Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Sarah Pidgeon, Tariq Weathers, and Jonah Hauer-King facing a familiar evil after something happened “last summer” to them.

But it’s the return of original stars Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt that might have garnered the most excitement from a different generation of horror fans — or those who’ve rediscovered the 1997 original and its sequels.

There’s one famous face, though, who won’t be making a return, though not without a lot of effort and persuading and outside-the-box thinking to try and make it happen. And it all comes back to what happened in that very first film.

Writer/director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson admitted that she “tried relentlessly” to convince Sarah Michelle Gellar to come back, but she couldn’t make it make sense for the Buffy alum, despite some desperate creativity.

“I tried, okay? I harassed her! But she is dead,” Robinson told Entertainment Weekly. “I tried to pitch some crazy s— too. I was like, ‘What if it’s like you weren’t dead and you’re actually alive, but in hiding?'”

“And Sarah’s like, ‘I was on ice. I was the most dead a person could be. You can see my frozen body,'” Robinson continued. “I was like, ‘Yeah, but what if?’ And she said, ‘I am dead. I am Sarah Dead Gellar.’”

It’s not the first time SMG has quipped about being “dead’ in the fictional universe. She and Robinson describe one another as best friends, and she told People back in 2023 that the two share a joke that Gellar does have a role, “which is I am continuity.”

She said that she takes the role seriously, too, adding, “I’m always the one telling her, ‘Well, that would happen, or that wouldn’t happen with those characters,’ so I do have kind of an unofficial job title.”

IKWYDLS starring JLH and FPJ — but not SMG — hits theaters on July 18, 2025.