Freddie Prinze Jr. Is a Scream King for Every Generation

FREDDIE PRINZE JR. is someone different to every generation. To Gen Z, he’s Fred Jones, the blond-haired leader of a teenage detective group in the live action Scooby-Doo movies, which have found a new life online. To Boomers, his name conjures the memory of his father, comedian Freddie Prinze, who had a meteoric rise to fame in the ’70s but died by suicide at age 22, when Prinze Jr. was less than a year old. To Gen X and Millennials, he was a formative pop cultural figure, part of a crop of actors (including the likes of Josh Hartnett and Joshua Jackson) whose faces were seemingly on the cover of every glossy magazine. His career began in earnest with his role as Ray Bronson, a dreamy fisherman in 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer opposite ’90s all-stars Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ryan Philippe, and Sarah Michelle Gellar. The movie was screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s first script after writing the original Scream movie (directed by Wes Craven), which was released the year prior, kicking off a slasher movie renaissance defined by Williamson’s edgy meta commentary. It was a hit that propelled Prinze Jr. into Hollywood heartthrob status. He played the romantic lead in the generation-defining romcom She’s All That, and a few years after they had first met on set, he and Gellar became a Y2K it-couple. (They got married in 2002 and now have two teenaged children.)

More recently, Prinze Jr. stepped back from Hollywood to focus on his family while mostly committing to guest spots, voice work (he voiced the Jedi Kanan Jarrus in the animated series Star Wars Rebels) and a gig with the WWE as an on-air host and behind-the-scenes acting coach for their roster of wrestlers. His Instagram feed features Prinze Jr. living a hobbyist’s best life: miniatures painting, tabletop role playing games, and clips of the horror podcast he co-hosts with his friend, actor/director Jon Lee Brody, “That Was Pretty Scary.”

He offer up his working thesis as a scholar of the genre: “What was scary ten years ago is almost funny now. We’re always getting scared by new things,” he says. “So these directors and writers are constantly having to outdo each other on a rapid basis. That’s why horror evolves more quickly than any other kind of movie.”

The new I Know What You Did Last Summer–which takes place nearly three decades after the Southport Massacre of 1997–follows a group of teenagers who cover up yet another case of vehicular manslaughter on the Fourth of July. One year later, it begins to haunt them. Sound familiar? Ray, now a bartender who never left his hometown, mentors the new class of scream queens and kings, as does Julie James (the franchise’s original final girl, played by a returning Love Hewitt). After her marriage to Ray curdled, she’s wisely decided never to step foot in Southport again. Their dynamic focuses on the different ways Ray and Julie have confronted (or avoided) their trauma. Southport, now “the Hamptons of the South,” has erased its traumatic history from memory to Julie’s ambivalence and to Ray’s chagrin.

It was this new spin on a familiar premise from Do Revenge director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, a friend of Prinze Jr., that lured him back to the franchise for the first time since the 1998 sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. “We went and had brunch at this crummy diner, and she pitched me this story about how the same trauma can affect two people in completely opposite ways. It can make one person and break the other.” Prinze Jr. was excited by the idea of a formerly heroic figure turned into a broken man who’s responsible for his relationship falling apart.

Robinson’s take also including several nods to different genre classics—like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. A scene in which Ray dramatically enters a town hall meeting plays as an homage to a famous scene in the original seaside horror. “That entrance,” he says, “I was like, Yo, this is so Jaws right here. I love this.”

Robinson once asked the cast of I Know What You Did Last Summer to share their three favorite horror movies. Prinze Jr. listed the work of legendary director Dario Argento and the films of the giallo genre—”Italian horror, low budget, big production, great fucking music in the background. Some of the best soundtracks to any movie ever are from Suspiria and Deep Red,” he says. He also threw in a “goofy one”: 1987’s Slumber Party Massacre 2. “I’m just a big nerd for horror stuff, so I try to watch everything. It’s definitely a B-movie. The third act literally turns into a musical. The killer has a guitar that has a drill bit on the end, and that’s how he kills people. It’s a good movie to have in the background with all your friends, waiting for somebody to go, ‘Wait, what the hell are you watching?'”

With the new I Know What You Did Last Summer in theaters, Prinze Jr. spoke to Men’s Health and about his love for the genre that made him a star, how Ray’s trauma added a new twist to his franchise return, and what it’s been like to re-enter Hollywood.

MEN’S HEALTH: You’re a diehard horror fan, but you hadn’t seen your own horror classic, the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, until a few years ago when you watched it for the first episode of your podcast. How is that possible?

FREDDIE PRINZE JR: I don’t get off on watching myself on camera. That’s not my jam. And I also don’t like seeing movies where I know the ending. That kind of takes me out of it too. I used to go to premieres and walk the red carpet—that’s our contractual responsibility—then go to a bowling alley for an hour and a half until the afterparty.

MH: I Know What You Did Last Summer is significant to pop culture, but it’s also a significant movie for you personally: it was a big break in your career, and it’s where you met your wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar. What do you remember most about filming it?

FPJ: That I thought I was going to get fired every day for the first three to four weeks of the movie. I was certain it was going to happen. I had the least amount of experience of all the actors. They had all been child actors, and I had 10 minutes of experience outside of school plays and a theater group that I did in New Mexico. But after week three or four, finally, something in my head was like, Well, they’ll have to reshoot the whole movie if they fire you now, so I think you’re good. Then I relaxed a little and I had more confidence in the scenes moving forward. I actually liked my performance on the viewing that I did with [podcast cohost Jon Lee Brody]. My wife actually sat and watched with us that night too.

MH: The movie also turned you into a star on the same level as the rest of the cast.

FPJ: It put me on the scene. Without that movie, there’s no She’s All That for me. There’s no Wing Commander, which was a really fun experience even though nobody saw the movie. It opened up a lot of doors for me in this business. I had an overall good experience on the film, and I had a better experience on the second one. Loved [director] Danny Cannon, loved Brandy, loved Mekhi Phifer. It’s something that I’ll never forget. All those experiences helped shape me and made me the actor I am now—and I like the actor I am now a lot more than I liked the actor I was back then.

MH: Did you and the cast have a sense when you were filming the movie that it would be a pretty big deal, considering it was Kevin Williamson’s script following Scream?

FPJ: That was the only hint we had. Everyone knew how good Scream was. I think all of us probably read for that movie too, or wanted to but didn’t get the opportunity. [Prinze Jr. auditioned for the role of Billy Loomis, which ultimately went to Skeet Ulrich.] There was a tremendous amount of confidence in Kevin Williamson’s vision, in his words, and in the new world that he and Wes Craven had created with Scream. Kevin is not solely responsible, but still greatly responsible for that shift in the horror genre, and he continued going down that path with I Know What You Did Last Summer. Then a lot of other films followed that path. And then after 10 years, it got too diluted because too many movies were just like Scream, so the genre had to change. All of a sudden, Saw comes in and scares the crap out of everybody. And all of a sudden, I Know What You Did Last Summer is a comedy. Young people are laughing at it instead of screaming, which was heartbreaking, but I get it.

MH: The new I Know What You Did Last Summer has a fair amount of comedy in it. And director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s last movie was the dark comedy Do Revenge.

FPJ: Honestly, the reason I did the movie was because of Jen. I was already friends with her. I had seen what she did with Do Revenge—I saw her dialogue and her character-building and her set pieces—and I was just sitting there going, Man, she needs to do horror. She could do some really good stuff with this.

MH: Did you and Jennifer Love Hewitt ever discuss returning to the franchise when this pitch came along?

FPJ: We run in different circles, so we just didn’t have that kind of a relationship. We were always professional and cool with each other, but we just weren’t bros. I don’t have her phone number, so it’s not like we were talking like, “Hey, what do you want to do with these characters? What do you think?” “I don’t know. What do you think?” “I’m nervous, I’m scared, I’m excited.” None of that stuff happened, but I figured she would be on board when I heard the idea.

MH: People tend to assume that co-stars are best friends, which is just not true. Sometimes you’re just friendly coworkers.

FPJ: Sometimes you go to work with people and you don’t have a ton in common with them. You know what I mean? We were always cool and we would crack jokes and talk on set, but we never were like, “Hey, let’s trade numbers and go on a hike.”

MH: How did you work Ray’s decades of lingering trauma into your performance?

FPJ: Trauma is a weird thing, man. I approached this role with a lot of vulnerability and a lot of honesty. I didn’t want to manufacture anything. I wanted it all to come from a real place. To play a broken man is a hard thing to do. We try to delete memories and moments in our life when we’ve been broken and had to build ourselves back up from nothing. It’s rewarding, but it’s not fun. I tried to bring a lot of that to this role to show a guy that’s running away from trauma instead of talking about it, and where that could lead you if you swallow that pain for 20-plus years. There’s a lot of that subtext in there.

MH: You took a step back from Hollywood for a while. This film marks your return to a big studio movie after a long absence. How has it changed since you first came into acting?

FPJ: It’s night and day. When I was in the game, studios weren’t publicly traded companies yet. They weren’t owned by corporations, so the executives were much different than they are now. Now the executives do things much more mathematically, whereas before, the executives really trusted the vision of their filmmakers, their producers, their writers, and their actors much, much more. [Columbo star] Peter Falk used to say, “The studio should be an ATM with vision.” I always thought that was the coolest way to describe them. The new types of executives, I got along with all of them, but they’re definitely different from the ones I came up with.

MH: How are execs different now during the production process?

FPJ: There are a lot more voices involved. A lot more fingerprints want to be on there, so you have to figure out how to make everyone happy. I’m not trying to crap on anybody’s ideas, but it definitely is a different experience.

MH: It seems that what separates Hollywood today from the eras of Hollywood you’re referencing is that studios are more interested in earnings than artistic vision.

FPJ: I took a meeting, I won’t say where, and the exec mentioned a movie that I got excited about. I started talking about where that movie’s inspiration came from and how the director was influenced by this other director and that other director. I took it all the way back. And the person did not recognize one name or one film I mentioned. They just moved on to the topic of some union negotiations and I thought, Okay, this is a weird meeting and have a great day. That was sort of the end of it. They didn’t bring any work my way and I wasn’t expecting them to. The industry is still making great movies today, just like they were back then. Maybe not as many, and maybe less movies are getting made now unless they’re existing IP. At least five movies in every studio’s movie slate are going to be existing IP, then another two or three will be sequels, then maybe you get an opportunity for one or two original ideas out of the whole slate of like 17 movies a studio is going to make next year. But there are different challenges in every decade and every generation of this business, and you just have to learn to work within the system as it is now.

MH: They work when there’s something authentic at the core of the story. The I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise works partly because it’s about how people—especially women—experience and grapple with trauma.

FPJ: Jen Robinson was very determined and deliberate in making sure that was a big part of this. Horror is always about survival and being resilient and using your smarts. Horror movies have always been empowering.

MH: Does your performance in this movie mean you’re open to doing more dramatic roles, maybe in projects that are a little different from what you’ve done in the past?

FPJ:. My godfather tried to teach me at a very young age that you can only focus on what you can control. I’ve had that piece of advice since I was 12, but it took me more than a decade to really understand it. The only things an actor can control happen between the words “action” and “cut.” That’s the only time I’m in control. That’s the only leverage that I’ve got. I gave everything to this movie as far as what I can bring to the table as an actor, and I know that I became a better actor at the end of it than when I started because I approached it so vulnerably and honestly. So whatever happens, happens. All that stuff’s out of my control.

MH: You talked about some of your favorite old horror movies. Do you have any recent favorites?

FPJ: You’re kind of putting me on the spot! Sinners was a lot of fun. They had this great scene in there that I thought was straight out of The Faculty. Then I heard [director Ryan Coogler] talking about the movie, and he said that The Faculty was his inspiration for that scene. I love when directors do things like that—they’re saying, Hey, here’s something that meant a lot to me, and I’m going to show it to you with my own spin on it.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

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