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The actress says she wasn't "ever really insecure" until paparazzi photos of her at the beach went viral -- as she reveals she almost didn't appear in the new I Know What You Did Last Summer because she was worried "what people were going to say about how much older I would seem than when I was 18."
Jennifer Love Hewitt is speaking out about the attention on her body -- and how it almost prevented her from appearing in the new I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel.
A child star from her Kids Incorporated days, Hewitt was just 15 when she really hit it big as Scott Wolf's on-screen girlfriend Sarah on Party of Five. From there, movies like the OG IKWYDLS, Can't Hardly Wait and Heartbreakers followed ... and with those successes, came a lot of scrutiny on her physique.
Speaking with Vulture for a new profile, Hewitt said she only recently realized how much all that attention screwed her up in the long run -- saying something clicked when she watched the Framing Britney Spears documentary.
"When I started watching it, I was like, 'Oh, they talked to me like that. Oh.' I started crying for her. And then I realized I was crying for me," she told the outlet.
Saying it was "just, 'Boob, boob, boob,' everywhere" whenever she was talked about in the press back in the day, Hewitt said she "really wanted to be a good actor" and found herself constantly "trying to outact the conversation around my body."
That conversation reached record highs in 2007, after paparazzi snapped photos of her in a bikini in Hawaii, which led to media coverage about her weight. She hit back hard at the time, saying she wasn't "upset for me, but for all the girls out there that are struggling with their body image."
"A size 2 is not fat! Nor will it ever be. And being a size 0 doesn't make you beautiful," she added. "To all girls with butts, boobs, hips and a waist, put on a bikini - put it on and stay strong."
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View StoryPEOPLE Magazine then ran the photos on a cover, with the headline, "Stop Calling Me Fat!"
"I don't think I was ever really insecure until that cover. And then when it happened, I don't know that I've ever recovered from it," she told Vulture. "Because there's a part of me that's always like, Is this version going to be good enough, or is that going to happen again? Where somebody's going to be like, 'Hey, this is her without makeup at the cleaners. She looks 59.'"
As for why that hurt so much, she added, "Because that was me. I think that's why the insecurity carried on. I don't know if I've even ever put that together for myself other than right now ... I think I was like, Oh my God, I was myself one time, and this is what happened."
Hewitt said her late mother helped calm her down at the time, by telling her, "You don't get it. You can't win. This is just people having a problem with the version of you they think belongs to them. Take your power back. Belong to yourself, and don't worry about it."
She added that rocking t-shirts and a blazer in the new IWKYDLS -- in which she reprises her role as Julie James -- was "very healing" for her because "nobody's going to be talking about my boobs." She then quipped, "Oh, you want me to flash you? They're down here."
I Know What You Did Last Summer is in theaters now.
