JoBlo Originals: What Happened to Jennifer Love Hewitt?

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Jennifer Love Hewitt was one of the biggest teen stars of the nineties. First making a splash on Party of Five, she parlayed that success into a solid career in features, leading the teen horror slasher classic I Know What You Did Last Summer (as well as its less beloved sequel), the comedy cult classic Can’t Hardly Wait. Her fame carried over into the 2000s, with her showing impeccable comic timing in the underrated Heartbreakers opposite Sigourney Weaver, Gene Hackman, and the late Ray Lotta. She even teamed up with Jackie Chan in The Tuxedo. She also starred in not one but two Garfield movies (in which Bill Murray voiced the titular feline) and also had a role opposite Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin in the notoriously troubled Shortcut to Happiness, in which she played a sexy version of the devil.

Arguably, her greatest fame came on the small screen when she headlined the long-running series Ghost Whisperer, which ran for five years. After a second series, The Client List ran for two seasons, and a stint on Criminal Minds, Jennifer Love Hewitt suddenly vanished, with the actress taking time off to raise a family. She returned on the hit Ryan Murphy TV show 9-1-1. In this episode of What Happened to this Celebrity, which is written (with Mathew Plale) and narrated by Taylor James Johnson and edited by Kier Gomes, we celebrate the career of this underrated actress. Indeed, the time seems right for a significant comeback for Jennifer Love Hewitt, with her poised to star (opposite previous What Happened to alum Freddie Prinze Jr.) in an I Know What You Did Last Summer legacy sequel. Could her return to the horror genre pave the way for a major movie resurgence? Big things are likely in-store for this talented, beautiful actress, who remains an iconic star of her era and beyond.

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The second half of the 1990s was defined by teen slashers. After the huge success of Scream, theaters were flooded with films in which unfortunate American teenagers were mercilessly slaughtered. Since these movies required young casts, screens were filled with fresh faces. Each new slasher inevitably produced one, two, or even several rising stars—many of whom burned out just as quickly, with some disappearing before audiences could even remember their names. Still, a few exceptions managed to stand out. Today, we’ll talk about one of them.