I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER Director Says He Pitched "Some Crazy Sh*t" to Try and Get Sarah Michelle Gellar Back
Even in the world of slasher movies where people regularly rise from the dead, get impaled and still walk it off, or vanish for years before dramatically reappearing, some characters just don’t get a second chance. Case in point, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Helen Shivers from the original I know What You Did Last Summer.
Writer and director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, the mind behind the upcoming I Know What You Did Last Summer revival, revealed she did everything short of summoning a necromancer to bring back her friend Sarah Michelle Gellar, but it didn’t work.
Robinson told Entertainment Weekly: “I tried, okay? I harassed her! But she is dead. I tried to pitch some crazy s— 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.’”
If you’re sensing a theme here, yes, Gellar really wants drive home the fact that Helen Shivers is six feet under. She echoed that same energy when previously asked about a possible return after the sequel was announced, saying: “I am dead.”
Still, she’s not entirely out of the loop. Gellar added: “My best friend [Jennifer Kaytin Robinson] is directing it, so we joke that I have an unofficial job, which is I am continuity. So I’m always the one telling her, ‘Well, that would happen, or that wouldn’t happen with those characters,’ so I do have kind of an unofficial job title.”
Gellar even made a quiet cameo behind the scenes when she visited the set in November, posting a photo with Robinson and her husband Freddie Prinze Jr.—who is back as Ray Bronson. That snap stirred up some speculation, and Gellar later admitted: “It got me in a little bit of trouble.”
The movie also stars Jennifer Love Hewitt’s final girl Julie James and new cast members include Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon, Billy Campbell, Gabbriette Bechtel, Austin Nichols, Lola Tung, and Nicholas Alexander Chavez.
As for whether Brandy Norwood’s Karla from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is making a comeback? Robinson kept things cryptic: “You’ll have to go see the movie.”
So while Helen might not be clawing her way out of the grave this time, her legacy will live on in spirit.
In the film, “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.”
Sony Pictures will release the movie in theaters on July 18th, 2025.