SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major spoilers from “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” now in theaters.
Sarah Michelle Gellar never thought there would be an “I Know What You Did Last Summer” movie released in 2025.
“I don’t think I had that one pegged,” Gellar told me Thursday at the taping of the Las Culturistas Culture Awards in Los Angeles.
The new movie, directed and co-written by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, follows a group of former high school friends being targeted by a serial killer a year after they were involved in a deadly car accident.
“Jenn Robinson brought it up to me like three or four years ago – this has been a long process – I thought, ‘It’s such a good idea, but you don’t know. Do people still love the movie? Do people still watch the movie?’” Gellar said.
Just days before Las Culturistas, Gellar appeared at the new “IKWYDLS” premiere alongside her husband and original cast member Freddie Prinze Jr. While Prinze Jr. did interviews on that carpet because it was known that he, as well as Jennifer Love Hewitt, return for the new movie, Gellar posed for pics, but avoided talking about the film. Why?
Because, even though Gellar’s character Helen Shivers was killed in the first “IKWYDLS,” she makes a surprise appearance in the latest installment.
“Jenn kept saying from the beginning to me, ‘You have to do something,’” Gellar explained at Las Culturistas. “And I said, ‘I’m dead. I’m dead. This isn’t supernatural.’ She was like, ‘I’m gonna figure it out.’ And she did and it was brilliant.”
Helen appears in a dream-turned-nightmare of Madelyn Cline’s character Danica Richards. In the sequence, Gellar is dressed as she was when she was named Croaker Queen in the original movie.
What was it like wearing the crown again? “It was so surreal,” Gellar said. “When they put that on my head and they put the dress on and then I stood there – they had a picture of me from when I was the Croaker Queen [in 1997] next to it — I was like, ‘Oh, this is crazy.’”
As the scene goes on, blood begins running down Helen’s face before she starts to decompose. “I wanted it to feel really unsettling,” Robinson said in a separate interview with Variety’s Angelique Jackson, adding, “I wanted her to feel glowy and beautiful and effervescent and like the Helen Shivers that you remember, and then I wanted it to get darker and darker and darker as the scene progressed.”
Gellar also offered an apology to anyone who thinks she misled them when they’ve asked if she’s in the new movie. “I’ve always said, ‘I’m dead,’” she said. “I did not lie. I do not lie. I am dead.”
Prinze Jr. told me it was fun keeping Gellar’s cameo a secret. “I’m pretty good at keeping secrets, so for me it’s not hard,” he said at the premiere. “But I had friends who were like, ‘Come on, man, you could tell me. I was like ‘I ain’t telling you nothing, man. You gotta come see the movie just like everybody else.’”
In addition to Cline, the cast of the new “IKWYDLS” includes Sarah Pidgeon, Chase Sui Wonders, Tyriq Withers, Austin Nichols, Billy Campbell and Gabriette. The script was co-written by Sam Lansky.
You can watch my interview with Gellar below.
