‘I Know What You Did Last Summer' features shocking cameos by 2 award winners (spoilers!)
Guess we know what these two award winners — and I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise veterans — did last summer. Sony never tried to hide the fact that Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. would be returning for the just-released 2025 revival as Julie James and Ray Bronson, who barely survived their own close encounter of the slasher kind with the hook-wielding Fisherman killer in the original 1997 film.
But this latest Last Summer features a pair of shocking cameos by two other key players from the first movie and its 1998 sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Daytime Emmy winner Sarah Michelle Gellar and Grammy winner Brandy Norwood both return for the new film — which takes place 25 years after the events of the original — and their surprise appearances inspired loud cheers and applause in the screening that Gold Derby attended.
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Gellar's cameo was particularly shocking, because the Buffy the Vampire Slayer star was adamant in interviews that she wouldn't be joining Hewitt and Prinze — her real-life husband — onscreen, despite a personal appeal from the film's director, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. The reason for her resistance? The fact that Gellar's character — Southport, N.C.'s resident beauty queen Helen Shivers — didn't survive her first run-in with the Fisherman.
"As I explained to Jennifer, I am dead," Gellar told Entertainment Tonight in 2023. "I am dead dead. On ice. "[Jennifer was] like, 'Are you sure you're dead dead?' I'm like, 'It's soap-dish dead. I don't have a head. You can't write for someone that doesn't have a head. I'm dead.'"
And, for the record, Helen is still dead in the new Last Summer — avoiding the dual resurrections that Buffy Summers endured during the course of her vampire-slaying adventures. (If you need a memory refresh, Buffy was brought back to life by CPR at the end of Season 1 and via witchcraft at the start of Season 6.) Instead, Gellar returns in a dream sequence and greets her contemporary counterpart, aspiring beauty queen Danica (Madelyn Cline).
Gellar's return is hinted at earlier in the movie when Danica's best friend, Ava Brucks (Chase Sui Wonder), is filled in on the lore of the Southport serial killer by a visiting true-crime podcaster (Gabbriette Bechtel), who has Helen's face emblazoned on a T-shirt. There's also a cameo of sorts by Helen's equally dead boyfriend Barry Cox, played by Ryan Phillippe — the one O.G. cast member who doesn't return. During a visit to a graveyard, two characters stumble upon Barry's tombstone and make a joke about the double meaning of his last name.
Later on, Ava and Danica are being held at the police station when the latter falls asleep and slips into a hallucinatory recreation of the beauty pageant that preceded her predecessor's gruesome demise. Even in the afterlife, Helen has plenty of attitude. After teasing Danica for her Fisherman-related fears, she gives the poor girl actual shivers as her pageant-perfect face decomposes into a talking corpse.
Throughout her brief, but memorable cameo, Gellar is quick on her feet and quick with the quips — which gives fans all the more reason to look forward to the upcoming Buffy revival, directed by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao. Buffy's second life will also hopefully give Gellar a second shot at a Primetime Emmy nomination — something she was repeatedly denied during its original seven season run despite the show's acclaim. Her performance was nominated for a Golden Globe, a TCA Award, and a Gold Derby TV Award for Drama Lead Actress of the Decade in 2010, nine years after the series finale aired.
Prior to her vampire slaying days, she received two Daytime Emmy nominations for her breakout performance as Kendall Hart on All My Children, winning the statuette in the since-discontinued Best Younger Leading Actress category in 1995 at the age of 18. Meanwhile, her Last Summer performance netted her a Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Supporting Actress, as well as an MTV Movie Award nomination for breakthrough performance.
Make sure you don't run screaming from the theater when the Last Summer credits start to roll, because there's one more surprise in store. A mid-credits sequence switches locations to a suburban house where news coverage of the latest Southport killing spree is playing out on a living room TV screen. Watching the footage is none other than Norwood's Karla Wilson, who had the unfortunate luck to be college roommates with Julia during the events of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.
And she's clearly not over the experience all these years later. "Why do people keep trying to kill this girl?" she marvels to her husband. But then a knock on the door signals that her past and present are about to collide. Sure enough, Julia is there to fill Karla in on what just happened — and what's going to happen next. Another killer is still out there and rather than wait for him to come to them, they're going to go to him. Stay tuned for I Definitely Still Know What You Did Last Summer in 2027.
Norwood made her theatrical feature film debut with the Last Summer sequel, which hit multiplexes one year after she headlined the beloved 1997 TV movie musical version of Cinderella costarring Whitney Houston. Like Gellar, she was nominated for an MTV Movie Award and a Blockbuster Entertainment Award for playing Hewitt's friend and fellow Fisherman target.
The film also arrived in the middle of Norwood's storied late '90s Grammy run, which started with nominations for Best Female R&B Vocalist in 1996 and 1997 for "Baby" and "Sittin' Up in My Room," respectively. (Funnily enough, she didn't record a song for the second Last Summer soundtrack, but Hewitt did use the film to drop her own single, "How Do I Deal.")
Norwood struck awards gold in 1999 with her sophomore album, Never Say Never, featuring her blockbuster duet with Monica, "The Boy is Mine." That track received Grammy nods for Record of the Year and Best R&B Song, and won for Best R&B Performance by a Duo — a victory that the singers shared. Never Say Never was also nominated for Best R&B Album, but lost to Lauryn Hill's legendary solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
In an appropriate bit of timing, Norwood and Monica are hitting the road in October for "The Boy is Mine" tour. That's also when the new I Know What You Did Last Summer will be available for Halloween streaming. Now we know how '90s kids will be spending their spooky season...
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