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Freddie Prinze Jr. is opening up about difficult Hollywood experiences.
This week, on his “That Was Pretty Scary” horror podcast, the actor opened up about starring in the 1997 film “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
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Prinze Jr starred in the film, one of his first, alongside Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe and Jennifer Love Hewitt, but the experience almost made him quit the industry.
Referring to “weird” and “bad things” from the set, the 47-year-old recalled that it was mostly the feeling that the director, Jim Gillespie, didn’t want him in the film.
“It’s not that we weren’t on the same page, I knew what the correct choices were for the Ray character. He wanted a different actor, a really good actor named Jeremy Sisto, who I know and I like and respect very, very much,” he said, adding that it was writer Kevin Williamson who pushed for him and kept him on the project.
“I’ll give the man this, I think his name is Jim, he made no bones about it. There was no passive aggressiveness — which I hate — he was very direct in the fact that, ‘I don’t want you in this movie,’” he laughed. “So, when that’s your first job and you hear those words, it just wrecks you, man. It just wrecks you.”
Prinze also credited Gellar and Phillippe with giving him guidance and keeping him on course throughout filming, which led to a close bond even afterward. He and Gellar would go on to have a relationship in the years after.
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Still shooting the movie was not easy, and he revealed he “almost quit the movie” after a mishap that he said happened while shooting a scene on a motorboat, which he described as a “near death experience.”
“I almost caught a flight and went home. I was done. I had enough. They had broken a ton of union stuff that they shouldn’t have, like union rules. All kinds of things. And I just felt like yo, if I’m not wanted here, screw it,” Prinze told TooFab in an interview. “There’s other things I can do. I dropped out of Le Cordon Bleu to make this movie. I’ll go be a chef, that’s what my mom wanted me to be anyways. I packed my bags that night. I was just gonna quit the business.”
A producer eventually stepped in and convinced him to stay with the production for the sake of his castmates and crew.
“I wanted to fight that guy two or three different times. Once I felt was a legitimate reason, and the other two I was just pissed off, which, that’s not right. I’m glad everybody talked me down,” he said. “In hindsight, I’m not upset, because that movie launched my whole career. I wouldn’t have any of the things I have without that movie, I wouldn’t have my wife, I wouldn’t have all the other movies I’ve done, I wouldn’t have this podcast. We wouldn’t be doing this interview. I’m here because of that struggle and because of that pain and it was those things.”
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