Jennifer Love Hewitthas been acting since she was a child and Hewitt’s best movies and TV shows run the full length of her career. She has been lucky to successfully transition from roles for children to roles for adults without having too much trouble making the jump. Much of that success can be attributed to her appearing as a teenage character in projects likeParty of FiveandI Know What You Did Last Summer, which appealed to a wider range of audiences.
Hewitt has a varied acting resume as well. While many of her younger roles saw her play the girl-next-door-type characters, she has also played seductresses, appeared in dramas, comedies, and even done some singing. Hewitt has proven herself capable of fitting in to established ensembles, starring as the leading lady, and even taking on smaller character roles. As a result, Hewitt’s best movies and TV shows cover a wide range of projects for her.
Sister Act 2is widely regarded as not quite as good as the first movie. Despite that, it’s also incredibly well-regarded, especially by adults today who grew up watching lounge singer Delores (Whoopi Goldberg) pretend to be a nun to get a group of teenagers to bond and sing gospel music.
The cast of the movie is stacked with talent. Many of the young cast members grew up to have impressive careers in the industry, likeAlanna Ubach, who is a prolific voiceover artist and TV performer. Jennifer Love Hewitt is also one of those young cast members.
Though some audience members might not remember her since she is not belting out solos like Lauryn Hill, Jennifer Love Hewitt is great as a member of the ensemble. She is always perfectly in character, which can be hard for some young actors in scenes featuring a dozen or more performers.Many times, an actor could lose focus or appear bored. Hewitt, however, is always checking her makeup, gossiping with her friends, and really selling that she is the girliest girl in the choir.
Sister Act 2is a great demonstration that Hewitt understood early that the camera is going to pick up everything she is doing, and she has to be completely immersed in the role, even when she is not the focus of the scene.
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Kids Incorporatedis not as well known as children’s variety programs like Nickelodeon’sAll Thator Disney’sThe Mickey Mouse Club. That’s a shame because it also churned out some impressive child performers.
Kids Incorporatedwas not a sketch show, but it was almost segmented like one. The story of the show was that the group of titular kids were a music group who went on zany adventures, like finding an alien. Every episode featured a new storyline and plenty of musical performances.
This is one of the earliest projects in Hewitt’s career, and one that really sells her talent to wider audiences.Not only did she get to demonstrate her comedic talents, but she also got to show off her singing skills.As she got older, Hewitt gravitated to more dramatic parts, but she did release a handful of albums in her career, and this show likely jump started that process for her.
In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, high school movies were a dime a dozen. They also ran the gamut of rites of passage with so many of them focusing on Prom night, or the lead-up to it.Can’t Hardly Waitwas different.
Can’t Hardly Waitbounces its story around among attendees at the high school parties to end all parties - because it really is the last one for the seniors spotlighted. Hewitt plays one of the most popular and enigmatic girls in school. It seems like everyone has a crush on her or likes her, and she is not exactly a fan of the pressure. The main storyline of the movie sees a guy who has had a crush on her for the duration of high school wanting to finally tell her how he feels.
Much of Hewitt’s part in the movie is nonverbal.She spends a lot of time in the movie appearing vaguely uncomfortable in her surroundings, and seemingly like she is ready to jump out of her own skin.She does a great job with just a few looks and a handful of lines to show just how over high school she is.
Jennifer Love Hewitt’sParty of Fivecostar Lacey Chabert parodied herCan’t Hardly Wait character inNot Another Teen Movie.
During her teen years, Hewitt became known for playing “good girl” characters or the girls next door. She was often playing the wholesome one of the ensembles, the characters who got into the least amount of trouble, so any time she was able to break from that character type provided a nice change for her fans, but also a nice demonstration of her skillset.
Heartbreakerswas made at a time when Hewitt was known for playing that character type as well as at a time when she was primarily known for playing in dramas.As a rom-com with screwball comedy elements, the movie shows that Hewitt was really game for just about anything in her career.
Hewitt starred as the daughter of Sigourney Weaver, and the two were a mother-daughter con artist duo that manipulated those around them. They often seduced or married the same men in order to win big in divorce settlements, and Hewitt had to hold her own against movie veterans like Weaver andGene Hackman.Though critics might not have loved the movie at the time, Hewitt playing against type and getting to really let her comedy skills shine makes it one of the best movies of her career so far.
…the audience cannot help but root for her…
The Client Listis one of many dramas to air on Lifetime that is actually inspired by real events. In this case, the inspiration for the TV movie is a prostitution scandal out of Texas.
The movie sees a mother of three struggling to provide for her family when she and her husband are both out of work. She takes a job at a massage parlor, only to find out that the employees are also selling themselves. Rather than leave, she stays to make enough money to keep her house, but she becomes so good at her job that one of her clients starts supplying her with cocaine to keep her from being exhausted. Eventually, it all catches up to her and the entire community finds out the truth about her job.
Though Lifetime has a reputation for pushing scandalous stories with cheesy scripts, Jennifer Love Hewitt is the cast member who really makes this one work. She is completely sincere and charming in her portrayal of Samantha, and in a desperate situation, the audience cannot help but root for her to find a way out.
Hewitt was nominated for a Golden Globe for the TV movie. She also starred in the television series based onThe Client Listbut played a different character. It was canceled after two seasons.
Unlike a lot of actors who rose to fame during the 1990s, Jennifer Love Hewitt does not have a ton of horror movies on her resume. Instead, she spent most of her time on television. She did, however, star inI Know What You Did Last Summerand its sequel alongside other actors known for their teen projects at the time: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prince Jr., and Ryan Phillippe.
The movie sees four teens hit a man with their car and cover it up. The secret tears them apart and they grow apart over the course of a year until they are all back in their hometown on the anniversary of the incident, and find themselves targeted by a killer as a result of the secret.
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Though Hewitt has plenty of roles that require her to play dramatic (and in fact, most of her career is in dramatic roles), horror is a whole different kind of drama. The actor has to sell the suspense as much as the director or editor does in a project like this, and Hewitt excels in her role.
Criminal Mindsis one of the longest-running crime procedurals of all time. The show’s hook includes examining criminals from a psychological standpoint instead of simply solving the crime based on physical clues. While much of the cast remained the same during the bulk of the show’s original run (and in its revival series through Paramount+), there was a time when the show rotated through several different cast members as new people joined the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in the show.
Hewitt is one of those rotating cast members as she joined the show for a single season.Hewitt plays Callahan as someone firmly shaped by the tragedies of her best, always hiding more emotion just below the surface. Here, she is charming in the role, which is explained as her having been an undercover operative for the FBI in the past.Hewitt slots in nicely with the rest of the cast, able to banter and keep up with their dialogue easily.
At the end of her single season on the show, it’s said thatCallahan plans to take a year offto spend with her family after she learns she is pregnant, but she never returns to the team. That likely has to do with Hewitt also being pregnant at the time and giving birth to her second child during the time away. With theCriminal Mindsrevival going strong on Paramount+, it’s possible that Hewitt could return to the role in the future.
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Party Of Fivewas initially billed as a teen drama, but the show leaned into more family drama territory for the ‘90s. It followed the five Salinger children (hence the title) as they dealt with the aftermath of losing their parents in a car crash. The oldest brother, played by Matthew Fox, had to step up to care for all of his younger siblings, and they all banded together to run the family restaurant to keep it going.
Though Jennifer Love Hewitt was not in the first season ofParty of Five, she was a staple for the rest of the series. She joined in season two as the on-again-off-again love interest of Bailey, played by Scott Wolfe, the second of the Salinger children. Her character was presented as a young woman trying to find herself, something complicated for her when she learned she was adopted.
The series tackled a lot of mature, and sometimes tragic, topics, sonearly every episode of the show was a tear-jerker. It gave the entire cast, including Hewitt, a chance to master their dramatic acting abilities.
Jennifer Love Hewitt starred in a spin off series ofParty of FivecalledTime of Your Life, which lasted for a single season.
Most supernatural dramas focus on mysteries-of-the-week. WhileGhost Whispererdoes that to an extent, it also focuses on grieving and moving on, making it a tear-jerker of a series with bittersweet endings for nearly every episode.
The series follows Melinda (Hewitt), a woman who can communicate with ghosts. Over the course of the show, her abilities and the lore behind them are more fully fleshed out than they are at the start, but the lore is not what kept viewers turning in when the series was on the air.
Most episodes of the series feature Melinda bearing the responsibility of helping a ghost cross over. Melinda talks with ghosts, figures out what is keeping them tethered to the physical world, and helps them find a way to move on to the afterlife. Due to the nature of the storytelling, that meant a lot of the episodes also involved helping living people process their grief at losing a loved one.
The show made Melinda a counselor for the living and the dead in the way, and Hewitt gives deeply heartfelt performances in each and every episode of the series, cementing her as an impressive dramatic actor.
Hewitt won two Saturn Awards during her time onGhost Whisperer. The series was also nominated for four Emmys during its run.
…helping to ground9-1-1in reality.
9-1-1takes the idea of a medical procedural and a crime procedural and combines them with a healthy dose of character-driven story arcs. The series follows a group of first responders, emergency call operators, and more as they handle a variety of emergencies in the series.
Jennifer Love Hewitt, as she did withParty of Fiveas a teen, joined9-1-1in season 2with a connection to another main character. In this case, she plays the sibling of a character already in the show and became the love interest, and eventually wife, of another.Hewitt’s character is firmly entrenched in the show now, and it’s hard to imagine the series without Maddie as a dispatcher.
The series has a spin off set in Texas and another in development set in Tennessee.
Hewitt has tackled some serious subjects in the show beyond the cases-of-the-week offered up by the show. As Maddie, she has given a voice to Post Partum Depression symptoms in new mothers. While the series has featured some outlandish stories,Maddie’s have been some of the most realistic for the show, helping to ground9-1-1in reality.
