I Know What You Did Last Summer’s Returning Star on Being a Slasher Survivor

Freddy Prinze Jr.’s Ray survived the first round of hook-wielding horrors in 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer—then prevailed again when the mayhem shifted to a different seaside locale in 1998 sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That’s an incredible record for a Final Girl boyfriend in a slasher series, and Prinze—who will play the role again in the upcoming reboot—says that this time around, Ray has a new survival skill: vulnerability.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Prinze explained that he and the film’s director and co-writer, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge), aimed to bring a version of Ray to the screen that would feel realistic, considering what he went through three decades prior.

“I think what [Robinson and I] both brought to Ray was a lot more vulnerability in this movie,” Prinze said. The character now runs a bar, and as the first I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot trailer showed, he’s one of the first to speak out when a serial killer begins targeting the younger generation.

The violence also triggers the horrifying memories Ray has of his own experiences. “The amount of vulnerability we were able to put in there, I thought, was really honest and just organic.”

Clearly, Ray’s still feeling the effects of going to hell and back. “Catching up with Ray, you see how that has shaped him into the position he’s in now. He loves his town and not everyone else does, in his view, and he’s a little grumpier with the way the world has treated him since [the 1997 Southport Massacre],” Prinze said. “So he has gone through a lot, and I don’t know if he’s dealt with it the way the modern man deals with stuff, you know what I mean? He’s a guy from the ’90s like myself, so I think he’s probably bottled up a lot more of those feelings we’ve talked about.”

Making it through decades of trauma is one thing. But diehard fans might be wondering just how it is that Ray and Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character) survived that cheeky cliffhanger ending of I Still Know, which suggested they were both about to meet certain doom—building on a similar ending from the original, which made it seem like Julie was done for.

Robinson has clearly thought a lot about this, telling Entertainment Weekly that “I feel like those final scenes in the first two movies live outside the canon … because in the first movie she gets attacked through the shower, through the glass door, and in the second movie, she gets pulled under the bed. So they’re both alive and well, and what I will say is that we have continued the tradition in our film.”

Oh boy. We’re hoping that means both legacy characters come out on top (again) in I Know What You Did Last Summer, out July 18.

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