30 Jun Interview with Jennifer Love Hewitt
You might know her as Jennifer Love Hewitt or perhaps as Ghost Whisperer’s Melinda, but in real life everyone calls her Love. A little bit of Love is always a good thing but what’s a lot of Love like? Alison Bezzina spoke to Love herself to find out.
She’s small! No no I mean really small, but somehow she manages to fill up the whole room with her presence. Even before she opens her mouth, Love lives up to her reputation of being the bubbliest (verging onto restless) actress out there.
Jennifer Love Hewitt was nominated as the world’s sexiest woman a countless number of times. Her biggest debut was the classic horror movie – I know what you did last summer – and now, she’s become a household face as Ghost Whisperer’s Melinda, whose character communes with spirits and helps them resolve unfinished business with the living.
How does it feel to have been one of the world’s sexiest women so many times?
Very good, it’s just fine with me. (Laughs) It’s nice I like it.
Do you think it complements the no nonsense character that you play in the Ghost Whisperer?
Melinda is meant to be a pretty hotty toddy with her pretty outfits and everything and it will be fun when I’m eighty, when everything has moved way downwards and I can still show my grand kids that I was hot once!
Is it true that Melinda will be having a baby in the next season?
Yes she will, so a lot will change for her. She won’t know if the baby is going to be gifted, so she worries that the child will have to go through the ridicule that she goes through. It’s hard enough to keep herself safe let alone having to take care of a child. I mean how will she go to a bridge with a ghost at 3 o’clock in the morning when she has a child sleeping at home?
What is the most difficult part of doing the show?
I think the running is really tough because I have to do it in high heels so many times. Our producer just loves 6 inch heels so I have twisted my ankles no less than 17 or 18 times. Once I actually fractured my foot doing a running scene. So now we got these special tennis shoes that I change into and if you watch the show now you’ll kind of see me running in high heels for a few seconds, and then they’ll cut to a closer shot…and that’s because I’ve changed in these super high turbo tennis shoes so I can run run run.
Since you suffer from claustrophobia, how did you handle the scene where you were you had to be trapped in a tunnel?
It was hard. I had to be in there for a total of 14 hours with a 15 minute break every couple of hours, so it was really, really tough. Even if you’re not claustrophobic it is still very tough to do, so they built a mini swing wall which I could open to let some air in, but it was so dusty that half way through they brought in masks for the crew. Obviously I couldn’t have one even though I had been in there for hours, and with their masks on they told me not to worry about it! They said ‘you’ll be fine, you’re young’ (laughs).
Did you ever read your script and thought ‘oh my god I cannot do this’?
Yes. I thought that my story line for the fourth season was outrageous. It was the first time that I went to the producers and said ‘really we’re going to do this? Are you sure?’ When we went ahead with it, the audience’s reaction was bad – the way we thought it would be. People got really upset and women would yell at me in stores. They said things like ‘we can’t believe you did that, what were you thinking? We’re never watching the show again’. And then, the week after, we got our highest ratings ever. The numbers quadrupled. People were so angry that they had to watch it to see how it was going to turn out, and that momentum kept going and gave us the best ratings yet. So obviously the writers knew what they were doing, but I was very nervous when I read it because I’m not a big confrontation person. I don’t like to shake things up and I don’t feel that I have to fix things if they are not broken, so when I read it I thought that it was a big risk that could go either way, but it went well.
How hard is it to keep a ‘ghost’ show like this realistic?
The good thing is that on the whole people know very little about the supernatural. They only know what they are comfortable knowing. There aren’t a lot of people who can say that ghosts cannot walk through that doorway, so we have our own ghost rules that we stick by. Every director and every person that comes on the show gets a list of what the ghost can and cannot do and why, but we’re not regimental about it – if it makes the story line better we will let go of those rules for that moment to try to make the shot more beautiful or the story more powerful. However we do try to stay within the realms of what mediums have told us that these spirits can and can’t do based on what they’ve seen and experienced, but for the most part we try not to take it too far because Melinda is a real person, she’s not a super hero, and there’s no big crazy animal that’s attacking her
A lot of the story lines are very emotional. How do you cope with it?
The good thing is that at the end of the day I feel very cleansed. Any heavy thought that I might have had, or even childhood experiences that might have been bothering me, just flow away. (Laughs) Really when I’m done with the series I’m going to be the lightest person ever. I’ll be like ‘issues? Nah… I have none!’ because all I do is cry. It is exhausting though and on most days I don’t have much left to offer my friends and family.
What is it like to work with your boyfriend (Jamie Kennedy)?
It’s good. It works. I didn’t have any preconceived notions. It just kind of happened and I never stopped to wonder whether it would work or not. It has given us a really close relationship because we really spend a lot of time together it’s not like we’re always working to get to know each other. We get to see the good side and bad side, and we also get to support each other as well as celebrate together. There’s a lot of togetherness. It’s good to have somebody that you love and care about when you work the kind of hours that we do, and it’s nice that we never have to have the ‘how was your day?’ conversation.’ When we’re not on set together I know that he’s there taking care of things so it allows me to really rest and not to worry that things are going haywire without me there.
Do you ever get spooked out after the show?
Sometimes we go to work at around 1 o’clock in the afternoon and we won’t wrap until 4:45am. It’s dark outside and we would have done this really scary thing with my life having been in jeopardy all day. So the moment I say bye to everybody and get into my car it kind of hits me that I’m alone and I get a little paranoid. I know that a ghost is not going to jump out in front of me and go WAAAHHH!!! so I’m not really sure what I’m afraid of, but yes I can really psyche myself into being spooked out .
Will you be getting into directing and producing?
I don’t know if I want to be sixty and still acting. There’s a lot that goes into it with the hair and the make-up and people talking about you. Acting is my craft and I can’t imagine not doing it right now, but probably I won’t always feel this way so I really want to be able to have directing and producing as something that I can do if I’m not acting. Truth is, that I’d like to be able to do all three.
Wouldn’t that be too much to handle?
Not if you know me. Jamie always makes fun of me because whenever he asks what I’m doing on my day off I always have a full time table with a long list of things that I want to do. According to him that’s not a day off but I’m always like that, always on the move. I suspect that one of these days I’m going to turn eighty and then sleep for fifteen years….I’ll be knackered, but I’ll sleep then and live now.
You started very young and had a very stable career, but now we see a lot of new actresses that can’t cope with the fame. What is your advice?
I don’t know if I know how to give that advice. Part of it is their responsibility and part of it is not. I grew up in LA and when I was growing up club and bar managers did not let under-aged people in to feed them tons of alcohol and then call the press. If a normal 16 year old cannot get into a club then neither should an under-aged celebrity be allowed in. As a child I was offered lots of different things and I was put in lots of awkward situations but I chose not to go there because I had respect for my job and what I wanted to be. I also had a family who stayed very close and knew that I was a child in a very adult business. My mum was the adult until I was ready to be the adult. So the advice I give would not be for the girls but for the parents – they need to remember that their children are children and that they need to stay with them until they are ready to be grown-ups. In this way they have a better chance of not being so confused and maybe not taken such advantage of.
First Published on Pink Magazine – May 2010 view here
