Apart from championing double-barrelled first names, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Chad Michael Murray and Jennifer Love Hewitt were the heartthrobs of the Nineties and Noughties. Yet after adorning the walls of many teenager’s bedrooms alongside the likes of Ryan Philippe and Freddie Prinze Jr, our great crushes slipped off the radar. However, this year they are all set to make comeback, as they’ll appear in blockbuster TV shows and reboots of their biggest films.
While Gellar, Hewitt, Philippe and Prinze all starred in TV shows throughout the Nineties, their breakout movie was the 1997 slasher hit I Know What You Did Last Summer, in which they played four friends stalked by a killer.
As well as setting their careers in motion, the film was the meet-cute for Gellar and Prinze, who were 19 and 20 years old at the time. Prinze told People magazine that although the pair "really didn't dig each other," at first, they soon became close friends and eventually got together in 2000, before marrying two years later. They have been together ever since and share two children named Charlotte and Rocky.
Gellar and Ryan Philippe became co-stars again for the 1999 romantic drama Cruel Intentions, where they played scheming step-siblings caught in a love triangle with Reese Witherspoon, who was Philippe’s girlfriend at the time. The pair would marry a few weeks after Cruel Intentions was released, welcoming their daughter, Ava Philippe later that year. They had a second child, Deacon Philippe, in 2003 before divorcing in 2006.
In 2003, Chad Michael Murray came onto the scene as Lucas Scott in teen drama series One Tree Hill. He cemented his status as a heartthrob playing Lindsay Lohan’s high school crush in Freaky Friday, and then a football jock who wins over Hilary Duff in A Cinderella Story.
Over the last 20 years, the five stars quietly continued acting, but 2025 is set to be a big year for our Nineties crushes. A reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer is currently being filmed in Australia and is slated for release in July 2025. Freddie Prinze Jr and Jennifer Love Hewitt will be back, alongside a new cast of bright young things that includes Gabbriette, Outer Banks star Madelyn Cline, and The Little Mermaid’s Jonah Hauer-King.
When Sarah Michelle Gellar was asked if she would be reprising her role in the film, she reminded reporters “I am dead”, referring to her character Helen Shivers, who died in the original film.
Gellar got herself into hot water when she went to visit her husband on set back in November and shared a picture of a director’s chair to Instagram. “Then I found out that they hadn’t posted any pictures from the set yet — hadn’t announced they started filming,” she explained on a talk show. “Yeah … that was an ‘Oops! My bad!'”
Gellar was then seen to be cagey with a reporter who asked her whether Jennifer Love Hewitt would be signing on to the project. “I have nothing to do with that,” she said, before attempting to walk away. Fans wondered if there was any bad blood between the two of them, but Gellar later explained that she had “stupidly forgotten what NDA means once this month, and didn’t want to give anything away.
Meanwhile, a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was announced in 2018 but went on pause in 2022. Fans have not lost hope, as singer Dolly Parton, who was an uncredited producer on the original series, said last year that producers were still considering “revamping” the show.
Gellar initially shut down rumours that she would return to the series, but recently told Drew Barrymore that she was starting to reconsider. "I always used to say no, because it's in its bubble and it's so perfect. But watching Sex and the City [And Just like that] and seeing Dexter: Original Sin, and realising there are ways to do it, definitely does get your mind thinking, well, maybe," she said.
For now, Gellar is starring in Dexter: Original Sin, a prequel to the hit noughties TV series about a vigilante killer.
22 years after its initial release, Freaky Friday is getting a sequel: Freakier Friday. Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis return as the mother daughter duo who swapped bodies in the original. In Freakier Friday, Lohan’s character has her own teenage daughter and Chad Michael Murray’s character, Jake, will make a cameo.
Murray may look a little different nowadays, but Jamie Lee Curtis said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight that his teen crush status was evident during a round table reading. “We got to the part in the script where Chad Michael Murray walks back in and I swear to God… every single woman leaned forward,” she laughed. The film will be out in August.
Finally, Ryan Philippe will star in Motorheads, an Amazon Prime coming-of-age series about a group of car fans in Pennsylvania, out in February. Unroll the teenage posters!
