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How Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar Became Friends on ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Set (Exclusive)

Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar may not have had many scenes together in I Know What You Did Last Summer, but the pair made up for that between takes. The actors — who met on set of the 1997 horror film — became friends during road trips.

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“She didn’t have a driver’s license. She didn’t know how to drive. And we were shooting in Southport, North Carolina, which was an hour’s drive from the nearest Wilmington, which was the biggest city that was closest to us. It was an hour drive just to get to the gym. And when we transported the film down to South Park, she had no way to get up there,” Prinze Jr., 44, exclusively tells Us Weekly. “So, I started driving her, and that’s when her and I became friends. And we just would talk about life and stuff like that, and we had completely different philosophies on just about everything. ‘Cause she was a born and raised New Yorker and I was a born and raised L.A. kid, and we just looked at everything like night and day.”

I Know What You Did Last Summer
Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar in I Know What You Did Last Summer Mandalay Ent/Kobal/Shutterstock(2)

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Prinze Jr. and Gellar, 42, played Ray Bronson and Helen Shivers, respectively, in the haunting thriller and starred alongside Ryan Phillippe (Barry Cox) and Jennifer Love Hewitt (Julie James).

I Know What You Did Last Summer
I Know What You Did Last Summer Mandalay Ent/Kobal/Shutterstock

“She came right at the end. We screen-tested with two other girls here in L.A. Sarah, I think, was in New York at the time. And then when we got out there, they hadn’t found her character yet. And then all of a sudden they said, ‘Hey, we got her. She’s coming in.’ And she flew in, I think the same day as the rest of us, to North Carolina. And that’s when we started. But that’s when we all met. She knew Ryan from soaps, and she may have known Love. We didn’t screen test together,” he explains. “Helen and Ray didn’t really have many scenes together.”

I Know What You Did Last Summer
I Know What You Did Last Summer Mandalay Ent/Kobal/Shutterstock

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Regardless, the two would also bond over food. “By the end of the movie, I just wanted to be friends with her because I thought she was too skinny and I wanted to cook for her. Because that’s what my family does,” he tells Us. “And so, we started this weekly barbecue thing at her house, and me and my cousins would come over and cook food for her and her friends. And then we’d make sure everybody ate, and that was kind of how our friendship began.”

Gellar would go on to briefly appear — blink and you might miss her — in Prinze Jr’s 1999 comedy She’s All That. (The same year she teamed up again with Phillippe in Cruel Intentions.) Three years later, Gellar and Prinze Jr. tied the knot. They are now parents of daughter Charlotte, 10, and son Rocky, 7.

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