Jennifer Love Hewitt Says Journalists Used to Straight-Up Ask Her About Her Breasts

Jennifer Love Hewitt is speaking out about the “gross” encounters she had with journalists while doing press for her 2001 film, Heartbreakers. At the time, Hewitt was in her early 20s, and she explained in a recent Vulture interview how the focus of so many interviews revolved around her body. 

“It’s interesting, I just watched the Britney Spears documentary [Framing Britney Spears], and there’s that whole section in there, talking about her breasts. At the time that I was going through it, and interviewers were asking what now would be incredibly inappropriate, gross things, it didn’t feel that way,” Hewitt said. “I mean, I was in barely any clothing the whole movie. For some reason, in my brain, I was able to just go, ‘Okay, well, I guess they wouldn’t be asking if it was inappropriate.'”

Hewitt started being asked these gross questions after filming the 1997 movie, I Know What You Did Last Summer. “That was the first time that I had worn a low top, and on Party of Five, my body was very covered,” she told Vulture. “At a press junket for I Know or I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, I remember purposely wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Silicone Free’ on it because I was so annoyed, and I knew something about boobs was gonna be the first question out of [reporters’] mouths. I was really tired of that conversation.”

Now as a mom of two, she sees how wrong the media’s focus was on her body. “I had really worked hard in that movie [Heartbreakers] to do a good job as an actress,” Hewitt admitted. “So I remember one specific moment wishing that the acting had overshadowed all that—that for five minutes, they had said I was really great in the movie versus made a body comment.”

She added, “I think, ‘Gosh, I wish that I had known how inappropriate that was so I could have defended myself somehow or just not answered those questions.’ I laughed it off a lot of the time, and I wish maybe I hadn’t.”