00:00The I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel is now playing in theaters,
00:03and it's connected to the original movie in more ways than just its name.
00:08So, were Julian Ray, the only two survivors of the 1997 murders all these years later,
00:14and who's the killer this time around? Warning, major spoilers ahead.
00:19A toast to us, to our last summer of immature adolescent decadence.
00:28The new film picks up in the seaport town of Southport, North Carolina,
00:32which has now been revitalized and turned into the Hamptons of the South.
00:37Thanks to a wealthy real estate developer and the father of new character, Teddy Spencer,
00:41the tale of the murderous fisherman who went on a killing spree and terrorized a group of teens in the 90s
00:46is now completely erased from the town's history.
00:49As I'm sure you know, the movie sees Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt return
00:53as their respective characters, Ray Bronson and Julie James.
00:56He's just out there, and he's watching us and waiting.
01:00What are you waiting for, huh?
01:02What are you waiting for?
01:0527 years after the events of the first film,
01:08Julie is now a college professor in a nearby town
01:11who specializes in the psychology of fear and trauma.
01:16What are you waiting for?
01:18As for Ray, her now ex-husband.
01:20It's an urban legend, American folklore, and they all usually originate from some sort of real-life incident.
01:28He's still in Southport as he grew up blue-collar without the money other kids had.
01:33The cops are not going to help us.
01:36Then we'll find someone who will.
01:40It isn't something I like talking about.
01:42The new movie is riddled with Easter eggs, including the return of the iconic Croker Queen parade float.
01:47But the most glaring nod to the original is that this time around, the killer is Ray,
01:53along with Stevie, a member of the film's core friend group who works at Ray's bar.
01:58When it turns out that Stevie's friend from church was the victim of this film's car accident,
02:02she teams up with Ray to recreate the 1997 exploits of the fishermen to get revenge.
02:07We've seen you long play a good guy and a hero, but this movie, we see you play a bad guy.
02:11What was it like stepping into that?
02:13You know, my whole life, I wanted to do this.
02:15Since I was a little boy, I used to literally go down the hallway when it was lights-out time before I had to go to bed,
02:21and I would go into every dark corner and every dark room, and I was like three years old.
02:24My mom told me this story.
02:25I don't even remember doing this.
02:26And I would go, rah!
02:28And I'd go in the bathroom, the lights were out.
02:30Rah!
02:30And she goes, baby, what are you doing?
02:31I said, I'm trying to scare them before they scare me.
02:35The first movie I watched, I rented on Betamax, was The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
02:39But that movie made me fall in love with monsters and always wanting to be the man in the mask.
02:44And Hollywood, when I was making She's All That, wasn't going to ever let me be the man in the mask.
02:48That just wasn't an option.
02:49And this was my first opportunity to really get to be a monster.
02:53And the way that she developed this character and got him to this place was so organic and honest
02:59and broke my heart, to be honest with you, that I wanted to do that to the audience.
03:05I want the audience to be like, not Ray, not Ray.
03:09And so I tried to bring as much vulnerability and pain to the performance as I possibly could
03:14with all the life experience I have now at almost 50 years old.
03:18As for the reason behind Ray's turn to the dark side,
03:20he was angry that the story of what happened to him and his friends had been erased from Southport history,
03:25and he never addressed the trauma it all caused him.
03:28And let me give you some advice.
03:30When you leave a man for dead, make sure he's really dead.
03:39Director and co-writer Jennifer Caten Robinson opened up about how the characters from the original film
03:44and the ones in this new one are connected through their traumas.
03:48Like, the way in which the original sin eats at our characters in this movie
03:53eats at our characters from the original movie,
03:56because I think that it all kind of is of the same thing.
04:01They are all dealing with the guilt and shame of what they did.
04:05And some of those characters are dealing with that over the course of a year,
04:08and some of those characters are dealing with that over the course of 27 years.
04:11But the wound is the same for everyone,
04:14and I think that was the most interesting thing to me about this movie.
04:17It is a movie about seven characters who all have the same wound,
04:21and how does that change each of them differently?
04:24For much more on the new I Know What You Did Last Summer film,
04:27go to THR.com.
04:28For The Hollywood Reporter News, I'm Tiffany Taylor.
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