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Jennifer Love Hewitt’s hindsight is 20/20.
The “Ghost Whisperer” actress reflected on being sexualized as a teen and having “grown men” make jokes about her breasts during her appearance on Tuesday’s episode of “Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown” podcast.
“There were grown men talking to me at 16 about my breasts openly on a talk show, and people were laughing about it. It was a culture that was fully accepted, but when you sit, and you look at where we are now versus then, it is really mind-blowing,” Hewitt, now 45, said.
“In hindsight, it was really strange, I think, to become a sex symbol sort of like before I even knew what that was,” she continued. “I didn’t know what being sexy meant.”
The “Client List” star also recalled random men coming up to her and making sexually charged comments about her 1999 Maxim cover when she was 17.
“People would openly walk up and be like, ‘I took your magazine with me on a trip last week,’” Hewitt said, admitting that she would just laugh off the remarks.
“I didn’t really know what that meant,” she added. “It’s kind of gross.”
Later in the episode, Hewitt remembered how jokes about her breasts became normalized after starring in “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
“When the movie came out, everybody said, ‘Oh, I know what your breasts did last summer,’ and that was like the joke,” she explained. “And, again, everybody would laugh, so I would laugh. It was supposed to be funny, I guess. It didn’t register with me that this is a grown man talking to me about my breasts on national television.”
However, the actress said she doesn’t “blame” anyone who was cracking those jokes at the time.
“It was a culture that was fully accepted. They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate, and I answered the questions, laughed right along with them,” she admitted.
The “Party of Five” alum said at times she would try to downplay the attention on her breasts.
“I had bigger boobs for a smaller person, and so it was embarrassing. I didn’t want to be looked at by a 40-year-old in Pizza Hut,” she said, adding that she “always wore big clothes” to cover up her figure.
Once she starred in “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” she recalled being “so mad” that her chest became the main topic of conversation.
“I had worked so hard trying to be good in a horror movie, and I really wanted people to walk away from the movie going, ‘That’s a really good actress,’” Hewitt said.
“And instead, every headline — and I’m not even joking — for 10 or 12 years after that … it was always about my breasts, always first. … That was heartbreaking for me.”
