Actress Jennifer Love Hewitt slammed Hollywood for sexualizing her when she was younger, saying, “I felt watched,” adding, “I was called sexy before I ever knew what being sexy was.”
“I felt watched,” Love Hewitt said during a recent interview on the Inside of You With Michael Rosenbaum podcast. “I felt like I had to be everything for everybody all the time. I was called sexy before I ever knew what being sexy was.”
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“I was 17-years-old on the cover of Maxim, and I had no idea why I was on the cover of Maxim,” the I Know What You Did Last Summer star continued. “I was honored, and I loved it. But I remember doing Heartbreakers at 23, and the director was like, ‘We just need you to be sexier,’ and I had to pull him aside, and I was like, ‘I don’t know what that means.'”
Love Hewitt also addressed social media users who troll her on the internet by comparing her to how she used to look when she was in her early 20s:
There are those people out there, and the only reason those people bother me is because — I’m a mother of a girl — and it’s dangerous, what we put on people. It’s dangerous, I think, to say to women, “You can’t look like you’re not 22 to me anymore, because I don’t know how to take that.” Okay, well, that’s your problem, because I’m 44, and I this is what I look.
The Tuxedo star added that she believes these online trolls seemed to have picked “somewhere between 23 and 25 for me.”
“Which, by the way, she was a looker, like, congratulations to that 23 or 25 year old,” Love Hewitt said of herself at 23 and 25 years old.
“But also, like, that 23 and 25-year-old wasn’t in her body,” she actress continued. “I didn’t feel self-confident. I felt watched. I felt like I had to be everything for everybody all the time. I was called sexy before I ever knew what being sexy was.”
Love Hewitt went on to say that the social media trolls “pick this age,” and “they find this little pocket of time, and they hold you there.”
“And I think as a society where haters or, you know, whatever the small group of people are out there, I think we have to do better,” she said. “I think we have to be kinder to people, and I think we have to allow people to change and grow and and look different, and just wish them well.”
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