Mom of three Hewitt — she shares Autumn, 11, Atticus, 10 and and Aidan, 4 with husband Brian Hallisay — has admitted that she hasn’t always felt as confident as she looked at the premiere. “It’s been a hard start to the year,” she shared with a makeup-free selfie to mark her 46th birthday in February. “I don’t quite feel myself. But yet I feel like maybe this is all to bring me closer to who I am meant to be.” She added that she’s “learning to love the skin I’m in more and more these days” — and last night, it definitely showed.
The actress has also spoken about how freaked out she is now about the attention her body got back in 1997, when she first shot to fame in the original I Know What You Did Last Summer series. “In my 30s, I sort of went back and looked at that time again and I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” she told fellow teen star
Hitting the red carpet in your 40s is scary stuff. You’re surrounded by actresses and models half your age, who weren’t even born when you first got famous. And you know that everyone will be looking at you, waiting to comment on how you’ve aged or changed too much (she’s let herself go!) or not aged or changed enough (she’s ruined her looks with surgery!)
But at the I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot premiere in Los Angeles on Monday, July 14, Jennifer Love Hewitt did her bit for 40-something women everywhere: we’re not invisible, we know who we are and how to look good, and we can still hold our own at any occasion.
From her figure-hugging beaded dress to her eye-catching red hair, the 46-year-old actress looked sexy, classy and strong: all the words midlife women aspire to be, but so often worry about getting right. It was easy in our 20s when we went out all the time: we just liberally applied dry shampoo, slipped into whatever smelled the least of other people’s stale cigarette smoke, took 57 extreme-angle MySpace selfies and we were good to go.
But as a 40-something, especially a 40-something mom? Ugh, it’s a minefield. You don’t want to get accused of dressing “too young,” but you don’t want to look frumpy and dated either. You’re worried your body isn’t what it used to be, and that even the $68 Victoria Beckham concealer you saved up for can’t disguise how tired you are.
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Now, imagine all that — except you’re not just a normal woman, but a gorgeous Hollywood actress who used to appear on the front of every men’s magazine of the late 1990s, often in a bikini.
Yup, it’s fair to say the pressure was on Hewitt last night — but wow, did she nail it. She didn’t look great for her age. She didn’t look great for her size. She looked great, period. And it should be a reminder to midlife women everywhere that it doesn’t matter if we’ve gained a couple of decades or pounds since we were literal teenagers, we can still dazzle with the best of them.
The cast of I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) Eric Charbonneau/Sony Pictures via Getty Images
Mom of three Hewitt — she shares Autumn, 11, Atticus, 10 and and Aidan, 4 with husband Brian Hallisay — has admitted that she hasn’t always felt as confident as she looked at the premiere. “It’s been a hard start to the year,” she shared with a makeup-free selfie to mark her 46th birthday in February. “I don’t quite feel myself. But yet I feel like maybe this is all to bring me closer to who I am meant to be.” She added that she’s “learning to love the skin I’m in more and more these days” — and last night, it definitely showed.
The actress has also spoken about how freaked out she is now about the attention her body got back in 1997, when she first shot to fame in the original I Know What You Did Last Summer series. “In my 30s, I sort of went back and looked at that time again and I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” she told fellow teen star Mayim Bialik on her “Breakdown” podcast in January 2025. “There were grown men talking to me at 16 about my breasts just openly on a talk show, and people were laughing about it. I don’t even remember that, I really didn’t take that part in, but in hindsight it was really strange I think to become a sex symbol sort of for people before I even knew what that was.”
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Hewitt even remembers wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Silicon Free’ after speculation that she’d had a boob job when she was, in fact, just a normal growing teenager. “After the movie came out, everybody said, ‘Oh, I know what your breasts did last summer’ and that was the joke,” she said. “Everybody would laugh, and so I would laugh, ’cause it was supposed to be funny, I guess. It didn’t register with me that this was a grown man talking about my breasts on national television.”
Thankfully, these days men on talk shows are generally a little less crass, but the damage is still there for those of us who came of age during the insane Y2K body image era. We remember size 0 celebrities getting weighed on TV; we remember stores not selling fashionable clothes over a size 8; we remember walking down the street feeling like our flaws were being scrutinized and captioned. For stars like Hewitt, that actually happened on a daily basis, but she’s somehow come out of it with grace and confidence.
So, next time you’re fretting in the mirror about what to wear for that work presentation, school benefit or post-divorce date, picture Hewitt on the red carpet, nailing it.
Source:: Entertainement – usweekly – celebrity body
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