‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Director Tried to Get Sarah Michelle Gellar to Come Back

Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. are both back for the I Know What You Did Last Summer legacy sequel, but one member of the original slasher movie’s cast who won’t be back is ’90s icon Sarah Michelle Gellar. This week’s trailer (below) all but confirmed what we already knew many years ago: Gellar’s Helen Shivers is very much DEAD.

But director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) tried her best to bring Helen Shivers back to the screen for this year’s new reboot, she reveals to Entertainment Weekly.

“I tried relentlessly, and she’s dead,” Kaytin Robinson tells the outlet, speaking about Helen. “I tried, okay? I harassed her! But she is dead. I tried to pitch some crazy shit too.”

“I was like, ‘What if it’s like you weren’t dead and you’re actually alive, but in hiding?’ And Sarah’s like, ‘I was on ice. I was the most dead a person could be. You can see my frozen body.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but what if?’ And she said, ‘I am dead. I am Sarah Dead Gellar.'”

What about Brandy, who appeared in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer back in 1998? The answer there is a bit different. “You’ll have to go see the movie,” the director teases.

[Related] Sarah Michelle Gellar Joins the Cast of ‘Ready or Not 2’!

I Know What You Did Last Summer returns to the big screen on July 18, 2025.

In this summer’s new movie, “When five friends inadvertently cause a deadly car accident, they cover up their involvement and make a pact to keep it a secret rather than face the consequences. A year later, their past comes back to haunt them and they’re forced to confront a horrifying truth: someone knows what they did last summer…and is hell-bent on revenge.

“As one by one the friends are stalked by a killer, they discover this has happened before, and they turn to two survivors of the legendary Southport Massacre of 1997 for help.”

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