Fans who were excited to see Lola Tung and Nicholas Alexander Chavez in the new I Know What You Did Last Summer film shouldn’t get their hopes up.
Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson recently told People magazine that the two actors’ scenes were nicked from the final cut of the slasher sequel, despite the filmmaker initially planning to open the movie with them.
“In every movie, it’s best laid plans, and then you edit the movie and you put it together and you go, ‘I love this in a vacuum. This is a fantastic scene. But it doesn’t fit in the movie,’” Robinson explains of her decision to cut Tung and Chavez’s scenes.
“It was just one of those situations where it had nothing to do with Lola and Nicholas — they are both so fantastic. I really would love to work with them again. I loved working with them. They did a fabulous job,” she added. “But in the larger tapestry of the film, it just didn’t fit.”
The Do Revenge director said it always “sucks” when you have to cut someone’s scenes, “because you don’t want to do that to those actors. And it sucks when you love something as a scene but that scene just doesn’t work in the final cut of the film.”
Chavez, who rose to fame last year with his portrayal of Lyle Menendez in Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, previously told The Hollywood Reporter that he “had a really great time” shooting the reboot.
“All of the horror fans are gonna come for me as soon as they see this, but I had no idea what I Know What You Did Last Summer was before they came to me with the idea,” he added about joining the project. “I live under a rock — please don’t give me a hard time about it — but we started talking about it and then I turned to my girlfriend who’s like the biggest horror movie nerd of all time, and her whole face lights up, her jaw drops and she’s like, ‘We gotta go watch watch the movie right now.’ So we go into the living room where our TV is and we throw it on and it was just so much fun.”
Chavez continued, “I grew up a Scooby-Doo kid, so to see Freddie Prinze Jr. doing a different thing other than Fred, that was a lot of fun. So I got back on the phone and talked to the director [Robinson] and was listening to her pitch the direction that it should go in, and I was like, ‘Yeah!’”
The I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot, which hits theaters on Friday, sees Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt reprise their roles from the original 1997 pic. The film also stars Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Sarah Pidgeon, Jonah Hauer-King and Tyriq Withers.