Ravage These Secrets About I Know What You Did Last Summer Right Now

You may have seen a lot of movies in 1997, but only one comes to mind about four hot friends running over a fisherman who knows his way around a hook and making the huge mistake of assuming he was dead.

Starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Ryan Phillippe, I Know What You Did Last Summer played a key role in the 1990s-era resurgence of the teen horror genre, a movement spurred by Scream but cemented by the similar box office success of this film's more straight-forward approach to terror.

"I auditioned for Scream, it was gonna be me or [Skeet Ulrich]," Prinze told E! News in 2017 of trying out for the role of Neve Campbell's suspiciously-into-horror-movies boyfriend in the 1996 hit. But Kevin Williamson, who wrote both films, thought he would be all that and more for the part of Ray, the seemingly nice (though he does own a slicker) love interest of Hewitt's Julie in IKWYDLS.

Of course the rest is boy-meets-Buffy history for Prinze, so that worked out as fate intended. Plus, he and Hewitt (spoiler alert) returned for 1999's I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and are both attached to reprise their roles in a legacy sequel that's in development.

Gellar, however, had a simple explanation for why she won't be along for the ride, telling People, "I am dead." 

Meanwhile, the IKWYDLS universe also includes 2006's straight-to-video I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer and a Prime Video series 

But the 1997 original was a perfectly timed spooky season release, serving up chills, thrills and some iconic imagery that bonded the film's stars for life, two of them for better or for worse. 

So if what you were waiting for was a deep dive into the making of I Know What You Did Last Summer, you're in luck. Read on for all the secrets: 

Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar did meet making I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997, but it wasn't love at first sight. Rather, the costars didn't couple up until three years later.

"We were friends for a very long time. We've had many dinners before," Gellar told People in 2020, recalling the night they sped out of the friend zone. "We were just two people at dinner catching up. We had a long car ride and a long dinner, and things just happened."

By then, Prinze told E! News in 2017, "She knew what kind of guy I was. She knew what my morals were, what my priorities were and vice versa. We already kind of knew all the faults in the other person." 

With any potential obstacles to happiness pre-slayed, the devoted duo married in 2002.

Jennifer Love Hewitt, who played final girl Julie James, was the first of the four leads to be cast, director Jim Gillespie said, after Reese Witherspoon turned it down.

But it was Witherspoon who turned the production on to Ryan Phillippe, the actor she met at her own 21st birthday (before they starred in Cruel Intentions together) and would marry in 1999 (and divorce in 2007).

"We asked her who the hottest guy was, in her opinion," Gillespie told Digital Spy in 2017, "and she said Ryan Phillippe."

Hewitt initially went in to audition for the role of doomed beauty queen Helen Shivers, the part played by Gellar, who ended up being the last lead cast.

"We ended up in North Carolina, a matter of two weeks out from shooting, and we still hadn't cast Helen," Gillespie said. "I got it down to three girls. I had seen some of Buffy; they'd shot the pilot. [Screenwriter Kevin Williamson] liked the idea of her, which was good. So she flew down to Wilmington and to me, Sarah was it. She was absolutely it."

But for Hewitt, "I was like, 'It doesn't feel like me,'" she told Entertainment Tonight in May. "They said, 'OK, well, what do you want to do?' I was like, 'I want to audition for Julie James. That's what I want to do.' They were like, 'OK. Well, go outside. In 10 minutes you have to come back in and audition for Julie James.' I just knew that I was more her. When they said I got it I like lost my mind."

Scoring her first lead role in a film, Hewitt was admittedly "terrified" of screwing up.

"I was like, 'Am I messing up the entire movie?'" she recalled. "I couldn't sleep [when] we were doing the first movie because I literally would be up until the middle of the night with somebody chasing me and then they'd be like, 'OK, it's wrap. Go home.' How does one sleep during this process?"

Aside from meeting the love of his life, Prinze's experience making IKWYDLS—his first big role in a major film—was not great.

"The director made certain I knew I was not his choice for the film every single day," he told Chris Van Vliet in 2022. "The producers and the studio, I was their choice, but he wanted a different actor."

Reiterating as much to TooFab in 2023, Prinze said there was "no passive aggressiveness" from Gillespie, but rather he "was very direct in the fact that, 'I don't want you in this movie.' So when that's your first job and you hear those words, it just wrecks you."

Ultimately, he continued, "It was very difficult waking up in the morning—or in the afternoon, because we shot a lot of nights — and go to work with the right attitude."

The actor Gillespie wanted to play Barry? 

"A really good actor named Jeremy Sisto," Prinze told TooFab, "who I know and I like and respect very, very much."

But ultimately, he continued, the studio and Williamson wanted Prinze. 

Noting that it was no fault of the film's stunt coordinator Freddie Hice (who returned for the sequel), Prinze said he was asked to do a stunt that he was in no way qualified to pull off.

"They wanted me to drive this dinghy with an outboard motor over the wake of this boat," Prinze told Van Vliet. And when he tried, "I fly out of the boat, it goes right over my head—I don't know how close it was, but it felt like it was a millimeter. I get out of the water and I'm pissed." (A professional stuntman eventually did the trick.)

Recalling the director getting mad at him for not being able to execute, "I almost caught a flight and went home," he told TooFab. "I was done. I had enough."

Prinze said all of his costars, including his eventual wife, were great to him on set, but singled out Phillippe for being especially encouraging when he was having a hard time.

"I remember Ryan came up to me and was like, 'Screw that guy, man. How many times did you audition for this movie?' and I go, 'Five times,'" Prinze told TooFab. "He goes, 'Yeah, you earned it. You didn't get offered the role, you earned it. There were less people every single time time you went and then it was just you. Remember what booked you this role. Screw his notes. Any note he gives you just say OK and do what you want to do.' He was the first person to say that to me."

Gillespie, who hasn't commented on Prinze's take, remembered the dynamic differently: He has said that he was the one who wanted Prinze to be in the movie and practically begged him to take the part.

"Nobody wanted Freddie; they thought he was too soft, he wasn't muscular enough, so Freddie probably screen-tested four or five times," the director told Digital Spy in 2017. "He got to the point where he was saying, 'I'm done,' and I really had to plead with him to stick with it because I wanted him. I thought he was going to be great with it. He went to the gym and worked out, changed his diet and his hair cut. I stuck to my guns and eventually they went, 'Yes.'"

Hewitt iconically screaming "What are you waiting for, huh?!" into the wind was a last-minute addition to the action. And you won't believe the twist.

"That scene was actually directed by a kid who won a contest to come on and create a moment for the movie, and it became the biggest part of the movie," Hewitt told Us Weekly in 2018. "I have no idea where he is but he's like, I want her to stand in the street and turn around and just scream, 'What are you waiting for, huh?' I was literally like, 'Are you kidding me right now? This is what I'm gonna do? OK.' This was a great idea."

Suffice it to say, she hasn't had many Halloweens since where someone hasn't asked her what she's waiting for.

When Helen unsuccessfully tried to outfox their tormentor, Gellar didn't escape the situation entirely unscathed.

The actress was watching the movie for the first time in more than 25 years, "probably since the premiere," Gellar said on SiriusXM's Radio Andy in 2023, and when Helen was running away from the killer "all of these weird memories start coming back."

She got "hundreds of splinters in each hand" filming the scene where Helen frantically pulls a rope to summon a dummy elevator, so the production had to swap in a silk rope for the very real one they started with.

Filming kicked off in March, and "it was so cold and I was in that little dress with no shoes, and they were trying to tape my feet so that I wouldn't step on broken glass," Gellar recalled. "I don't even know. And then I remember filming it again when it was warmer and how much easier it was to do when I wasn't also shivering and freezing."

At the time, much was made of Hewitt's prominent cleavage on display, particularly during the film's harrowing climax when Julie faces off against killer Ben Willis (played by Muse Watson).

But she did start off wearing a sweater.

"We'd shot the end sequence before we shot the last part on the deck with the fight and her screaming. She just had a little tank top on," Gillespie told Digital Spy. "And then we realized we'd made a continuity error where she was wearing a little jumper all through the first part, so we had to construct some reason that she would take her top off."

Julie ends up taking off her cardigan to use to hoist herself up to another section of the boat where it all goes down.

"People thought it was so you could see more of her breasts," the director said, "but actually it was because we had screwed up the continuity and needed it to match!"

Inspired by the seaside town that serves as the jarring backdrop for Jaws, Gillespie was determined to increase the quaint factor of Southport, N.C.

"There's lots of stuff that nods to Jaws: Fourth of July parades, all those things," he told Digital Spy. "We amped it up with a Croaker Festival. [Production designer] Gary Wissner designed these big fish buggies, fish hats. We got a load of local school bands to do the march for the festival. We went to town on all that! I wanted the waterfront to have a New England feel, and Jaws was that."

The Dawson's Creek pilot was filming during the same time and, seeing as series creator Kevin Williamson also wrote IKWYDLS, it made sense to use the dock set already built for the film in Southport.

Gillespie recalled, "It was all coming together at the same time with Kevin."

Muse Watson spent most of the film as more of a looming presence before he finally reveals himself as Ben, the left-for-dead fisherman with a grudge, but the actor said he "worked [his] tail off" to get it right.

"I was scared to death that if I loaned this guy my body, I wouldn't get it back," Watson told Vulture in 2020, explaining why he was cautious about taking his usual approach to a role with this haunting character. "It was really scary and I needed the credit, I needed the money. It was a career move. And as an actor, I knew playing a horror actor could put you down in other areas of Hollywood, which I wanted like hell. Nobody thinks that any of these horror actors act. I don’t know why. But for me, I put so much study into every move I made. When you see that fast walk, I practiced that. I practiced the hook."

His favorite scene: "Me laying in the ditch beside the road and I'm supposedly dead until they get there."

And he eventually got his body back.

Hewitt and Watson lived in the same apartment building in Burbank, Calif., long before she ended up running from him in IKWYDLS.

"We weren't best of friends, but we knew who each other was and spoke to each other at the pool," he told Vulture. "She was there with her mother. They'd gotten an apartment there to pursue her career."

When they did finally work together, it was a regular party of five for Watson and the four young actors he was terrorizing onscreen.

"I just thought they were all the greatest bunch I’d ever worked with," he said. "They're all such wonderful people, and I hope they have all the happy joy in their life."

I Know What You Did Last Summer was adapted from the 1973 YA thriller of the same name by Lois Duncan, who had sold the rights to her book and relinquished any creative input.

"I treated the entire story as a new urban legend," Williamson, who was recruited for this movie after writing the 1996 blockbuster Scream, said in the Sony Pictures featurette Now I Know What You Did Last Summer. The opening scene, in which the kids are debating around a bonfire which is the right version of the guy-with-a-hook ghost story, is one of his signature wink-wink moments.

But Duncan, who died in 2016, loathed the finished product, telling the Daily Press after a screening, "If it hadn't been mine, I’d have gotten up and left."

In addition to turning her creepy-crawly but teen-friendly plot into an R-rated slasher flick, albeit a relatively tame one, she didn't like that they moved the setting from New Mexico to a coastal town. In turn, she never visited the set, didn't do anything to promote the movie and skipped the premiere.

"They optioned my story, not my soul," Duncan said. "There is no way I want to be part of desensitizing kids to violence and turning murder into a game to see who can scream the loudest."

Gillespie said he would have preferred the death scene for Helen's sister Elsa (played by Bridgette Wilson) to be less explicit, but he was instructed to make it gorier.

"There's a splash of blood on the glass," he told Digital Spy. "I initially had shot that without any blood at all. I'd cut the sequence and it worked, everything was exactly as it is, but they wanted this [splatter], to see her throat get ripped out."

He refused, Gillespie said. "So the most I would give in to was the blood from behind splattering the window...We reshot that towards the end of the shoot and that was my, 'OK, I'm done with the blood.'"

Julie's stone-faced admirer Max, played by Johnny Galecki, was originally supposed to survive. (In fact, the only death in the book is the one that triggers all the regret and recriminations.) The decision to dispatch him came later after producers decided the killer needed to do more killing before he started exacting his revenge on the main characters.

So, they shot his death scene after filming initially wrapped, part of two days of reshoots.

Also tacked onto the end of the movie: The ending.

Originally, the credits rolled after Julie gets an email inviting her to a party.

"The first time we previewed it, it had that in and the movie had played really well but the movie you could feel was anticlimactic," Gillespie told Digital Spy. "The studio head came out straight way and said, 'We've got a hit movie here, but not with that ending.'"

Within a week, they built a little set and went back to work.

Enter Julie—one year after she seemingly vanquished Ben—getting attacked in a deserted women's locker room by someone who still knows what she did last summer. And, scene.

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