Jennifer Love Hewitt opens up about aging 'as humans, we want to evolve'
Jennifer Love Hewitt is fine with aging − she just wishes you would let her.
The "I Know What You Did Last Summer" star opened up about the sometimes frustrating public reaction to her growing older in an interview with Fox News published Thursday.
"For me, it's not personally hard," the actress said of aging but for fans, it's a different story. "I feel like fans pick… this age that they love that they think represents you, and you're never supposed to grow beyond that," she told the outlet, referencing a quote from Taylor Swift's documentary "Miss Americana" in which the pop star says something similar.
"For me… it was like me and my 20s … people seem to have a really hard time accepting that … I don't look that way anymore," Love Hewitt, now in her 40s, told Fox.
Rising to fame in the 1990s as part of a quasi-brat pack alongside stars like Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr., Love Hewitt became a teen movie staple. Both the "Last Summer" series and "Can't Hardly Wait" became cult classics, canonizing her as a teen idol.
But now she's ready to move beyond that.
"Whatever it is, you just want to have the freedom to be whoever you are at that age," she told Fox, "And it's hurtful sometimes when people reject you as you are verbally on Instagram or the internet because they're having a hard time adjusting to it."
This is not the first time the actress has pushed back against ageism in Hollywood. In a 2023 appearance on the podcast "Inside of You" the star lamented: "Aging is Hollywood is really hard. You can't do anything right."
"It's hard because I think as humans, we want to evolve," she told Fox. Her latest film, a Christmas movie on Lifetime which she both stars in and directs, features cameos from her real-life family. With it, she joins a bevy of former teen stars who populate the holiday movie circuit.
"The Holiday Junkie" premiered earlier this month and for now, Love Hewitt is just grateful to keep working.
"I wasted a lot of time worrying," the actress said of her younger self, telling Fox "I think I would just say to her like, ‘Look, it's going to work out. You're going to start getting old, and they're still going to let you do things… it's OK. You're fine.’"