Latest news with #IKnowWhatYouDidLastSummer
Express Tribune
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Netflix drops ‘The Waterfront', inspired by creator's real-life family drug ties
Netflix's new drama The Waterfront, which premiered on June 19, takes viewers deep into a coastal town torn apart by secrets, legacy, and survival—and it's rooted in real life. The eight-episode series comes from Kevin Williamson, the mind behind Scream, Dawson's Creek, and The Vampire Diaries. This time, Williamson delivers a raw, personal story inspired by his own father's descent into drug smuggling in the 1980s. The series stars Holt McCallany, Maria Bello, Melissa Benoist, and Jake Weary as members of the Buckley family, who were once-respected figures in the fictional town of Havenport, North Carolina. Once dominant in the local fishing industry, the Buckleys are now unraveling amid addiction, financial hardship, and long-buried betrayals. Behind the family's polished public image is a messy tangle of secrets and a willingness to do whatever it takes to maintain control—even if it means turning on one another. While the Buckleys are fictional, the emotional core of the story is deeply personal to Williamson. In recent interviews, the showrunner shared that his father, a fisherman by trade, began smuggling drugs during hard times to support the family. The consequences of that decision left a mark on Williamson's childhood and have stayed with him since. 'This is the story I've been circling for decades,' he said, referencing how the themes of loss, identity, and buried secrets have been present throughout his career—from slasher films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer to coming-of-age dramas. The Waterfront offers a gritty, emotionally charged look at the cost of survival and legacy—with Williamson finally confronting a story he's been carrying most of his life.
Time Magazine
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
The True Story Behind Netflix's Coastal Family Drama The Waterfront
The dock was quiet with the kind of stillness that settles just before dawn. Fishing boats bobbed in the tide, hulls worn and sun-bleached, their nets folded like sleeping limbs. For Kevin Williamson, it wasn't just a familiar sight, it was a decades-old memory. This was the world he knew as a child growing up in the small town of Oriental, N.C., a place where everyone was seemingly related to everyone, where seafood came straight off the boat, and where the tides governed life as much as the church bells or school calendar. 'I was the small-town weirdo,' Williamson tells TIME. 'I was the kid who didn't belong and couldn't wait to get out. Then I got out, and all I wanted to do was write about it.' With The Waterfront, his new eight-episode Netflix drama starring Holt McCallany, Maria Bello, Melissa Benoist, and Jake Weary and debuting June 19, Williamson has done just that. The show tells the story of the Buckleys, a once-proud fishing family in fictional Havenport, N.C., now fractured by buried secrets, addiction, and the threat of financial collapse. It's a slow-burn Southern gothic tale rich with betrayal and moral ambiguity, but beneath the genre trappings lies a deeper current of meaning. This is, in many ways, the story Williamson has been circling his entire career, as he broke out as the writer of such horror mainstays as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer and the creator of TV megahits including Dawson's Creek and The Vampire Diaries. 'I always told my dad I was going to write the story,' Williamson recalls. 'He said, 'Wait until I'm dead.'' And so he did. A family history rewritten The roots of The Waterfront stretch back decades to Williamson's own childhood. Born in New Bern, around 30 miles from Oriental, he grew up in a family shaped by the tides. His father Wade was a fisherman; his mother Faye worked at a hotel. 'I come from a family of fishermen—not just my dad, but the entire family,' he says. ' Everyone I knew was a fisherman.' But by the '80s, that way of life was vanishing. Overfished waters, tightening environmental regulations, and broader economic shifts devastated the industry. As the fish began to disappear, so did people's livelihoods, and in some cases, desperation filled the void. For Williamson's family, that desperation manifested in the decision his father made to use his fishing boat to run drugs, a crime which would catch up with him: 'He was arrested for conspiracy to traffic marijuana—20,000 pounds.' Though Wade ultimately served less than a year behind bars, the impact was deeply felt in the larger community. 'They didn't just arrest my dad,' he recalls. 'They arrested a whole bunch of people. It was part of a cartel. They were the low men in the operation.' The trauma eventually seeped its way into Williamson's writing. On Dawson's Creek, Joey Potter's (Katie Holmes) father serves time for a similar offense. 'That was the beginning of me fictionalizing it, but I always knew I'd come back to it,' he says. That unflinching, long-deferred return arrives in The Waterfront. But the road to telling that story began with a restless boy in a quiet town, one who found escape not on the water, but in the light of screens both big and small, captivated by Steven Spielberg's work and the classic soap opera Guiding Light. After high school, Williamson enrolled at East Carolina University, where he studied theater, graduating in 1987 and landing in Los Angeles by the early '90s. His breakthrough came thanks to a bout of late-night paranoia. After watching a 20/20 episode about Danny Rolling—the 'Gainesville Ripper' who murdered five college students in Florida—Williamson found himself home alone, unsettled and on the phone with a friend. The experience eventually sparked the script for Scream, which married razor-wire tension with meta self-awareness. Released in 1996, Scream didn't just succeed, it helped revive the slasher subgenre. With its whip-smart satire and adolescent vulnerability, the movie catapulted Williamson into the Hollywood spotlight. He followed quickly with Scream 2, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and The Faculty, infusing each with more than scares. These were stories about fear as metaphor: adolescence, alienation, the fragile armor of identity. Then came Dawson's Creek, a teen drama set in the small fictional town of Capeside, Mass., whose emotional frankness and hyper-verbal teen characters helped define a generation. The series was famed for its romantic entanglements and earnest dialogue, as well as launching the careers of actors like Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson, but beneath it all was a writer mining personal history for deeper truths. In the years that followed, Williamson explored the truth in darkness. He co-created The Vampire Diaries, a gothic teen soap pulsing with desire and loss, The Following, a psychological thriller about a serial killer and his cult, and Tell Me a Story, which reimagined classic fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel as twisted modern parables. Even when his work veered into fantasy, it never lost its grounding in emotional reality. Williamson's stories are defined by a familiar undercurrent: the bittersweet pang of longing, the weight of secrets, the intergenerational ghosts we carry. When it came time to create The Waterfront, Williamson didn't have to look too far. The fictional town of Havenport shares DNA with Oriental, and production took place nearby in Southport—the same town where he shot much of I Know What You Did Last Summer nearly 30 years earlier. 'I absolutely love North Carolina. Through and through, I'm a Carolina boy,' he says. 'Southport looks very much like how I grew up.' To capture that authenticity, the production team even visited Oriental to rent real fishing boats to use as stunt boats. 'It's a seafood fresh-off-the-boat type of town,' he says. 'That's where I got the idea for the Buckley fish house. It's common in little port towns: restaurants attached to fish houses.' That personal connection found its way to the cast. The Waterfront is a sprawling family saga anchored by characters who feel flawed and lived-in. Family patriarch Harlan Buckley (McCallany) is a hardened man recovering from two heart attacks who's pulled back into the family's struggling fishing business; Belle (Bello), his wife and the fishery's unofficial operator in his absence, is the pragmatic backbone of the family, keeping the business (and its secrets) intact with a steely resolve. Bree (Benoist) is the bruised and bristling daughter, struggling with sobriety and aching for redemption. 'Holt [as Harlan] has the exact same straight John Wayne persona [as my dad],' Williamson says. 'That sense of humor, where he can just throw out a line, and it's funny.' Bree is another reflection of Williamson's psyche. 'That addictive part of me, that's where I wrote from,' he adds. 'I took her to the extreme, but it's personal.' Then there's Cane (Weary), the son who stayed behind, who never chased a bigger life. 'Cane is who I would've been if I'd stayed in Oriental,' Williamson says. 'There were times I thought I might, but my parents pushed me out. They didn't see a future in fishing.' Each of the Buckleys strive for something elusive: approval, redemption, control, freedom. ('They want to love and be loved,' he says.) This emotional dynamic plays out in particular in the push-and-pull dynamic between mother and daughter. '[Bree] always felt like the outcast,' Williamson says. 'The show asks, did she feel that way because it was true, or did she create it?' Even the structure of the show reflects its themes. 'I tried to do a 60/40 ratio of family drama to crime drama, but any time you do a mathematical equation for storytelling, it goes out the window,' he says. Instead, he focused on the characters' journeys. 'I put my characters on a board: Where do they start, where do they end up, and how do I twist them through it?' The ties that bind With The Waterfront, Williamson is writing about the soil, the salt, and the silence of home. While the Netflix drama centers on hubris and crime, it's also about consequence. The Buckleys may bury secrets or protect one another, but they're not caricatures. 'We're not 'either or' in life. We're always 'and,'' Williamson says. 'We're good and bad.' That duality grounds the show's jarring bursts of violence. 'I love the dark,' he admits. 'It's my happy place. There's a whole horror side of me, so I think it's safe to say if you're going to watch a show that I'm part of, someone's going to get killed eventually.' But the brutality isn't purely for shock value. 'Sometimes we're knocked on our ass by life, and I wanted the show to reflect that,' he continues. The atmosphere intentionally heightens the sense of unease. Each episode opens with an eight-second title sequence showing the camera partly submerged in seawater, bobbing beneath dark clouds. It's disorienting and ominous, evoking the sensation of drowning or barely staying afloat. 'We went through so many different versions of the title sequence, but the idea was always there: treading water, drowning, danger rising,' he says. ' Who's going to survive? Where's the life raft coming from?' Williamson sees The Waterfront 's debut season as just the beginning. 'I would love very much a chance to write Season 2, because I feel like I'm just getting started with this story and this family,' he explains. Until then, the series stands as a meditation on loyalty, legacy, and the weight of unfinished business. 'I hope people connect to the messiness of family life,' Williamson explains. 'Regardless of what these characters do—whether they're fishing or getting their hands messy with a little crime and a little blood—I hope viewers connect with the idea of family. Each [character] is trying to be the best version of themselves. They just don't know how to get there.'
Perth Now
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Jennifer Love Hewitt teases ‘very different' Julie James in I Know What You Did Last Summer
Jennifer Love Hewitt has teased Julie James will be 'very different' in I Know What You Did Last Summer. The 46-year-old actor is set to reprise the role after first starring as Julie in the 1997 original and its 1998 sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and Hewitt has now hinted Julie has changed a lot in the upcoming slasher. Speaking about her character during an interview with Extra, Hewitt said: 'She's very different. I think you'll see shades of that girl because I want those to be in there, but she's lived in. 'She's in her 40s. She's carried this a long time. I think she's figured out how to deal. She's a professor in sort of the mind and trauma and PTSD field. 'So, I think she's figured out a way to put herself in a position in her life so she can deal every day with what happened to her in her teens. She's a little edgier. She's funny.' As well as Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr. will return for I Know What You Did Last Summer as Ray Bronson. Meanwhile, Sarah Michelle Gellar - who starred in the original I Know What You Did Last Summer as the ill-fated Helen Shivers - has been given an 'unofficial' role in the upcoming slasher by director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. I Know What You Did Last Summer - which will hit screens on 18 July 2025 - follows a group of teens who are haunted by a deadly secret after a hit-and-run cover-up. With a masked killer stalking them one year later, the group seek out two survivors from the infamous Southport massacre of 1997 as their past comes back with a vengeance. Previously, Robinson teased I Know What You Did Last Summer would be 'much more brutal' than the original. Speaking with People, she said: '[The horror elements are] ratcheted up to a hundred in this - it's much more brutal. 'There's definitely more methodology to every kill in this movie, unlike the first, which is kind of just him [the killer] stalking them and going after them. 'There's not a lot of gore or blood or violence in the first one. There certainly is in this one.' Robinson added she wanted to make I Know What You Did Last Summer for fans of the original flick, though emphasised the slasher would still be accessible to newcomers to the franchise. She explained: '[We] approached it like super fans, so I think people are going to be really happy. All the things that you want to see in this movie, you're going to see in this movie ... 'We very purposefully wanted to make this movie both for fans of the original who are coming to this and excited about the easter eggs but also for a new audience that can find I Know and almost watch the first one like a prequel. 'That was very front of mind for me as we made this movie. You don't need to do any research coming into I Know What You Did Last Summer. You just have to have a really good time.'
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr. return in 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' trailer: 'There was no movie without them'
Jennifer Love Hewitt is once again calling out her killer — this time in the reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer. The new two-and-a-half-minute trailer, released on Tuesday, kicks off at Danica's (Madelyn Cline) engagement party in Southport, N.C., where she's surrounded by her family and friends, including Eva (Chase Sui Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers) and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon). While opening gifts, Danica comes across an envelope with a card that reads, 'I know what you did last summer.' Soon, Danica and her friends are reminded of a deadly car accident they were involved in — and kept secret — a year earlier, on July 4, 2024. It's not long before the group of friends realize they're being targeted for the crime they vowed to keep secret. Desperate for help — and answers — they decide to track down people who've lived through similar terrors themselves: Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Southport's final girl, Julie James (Hewitt). 'You survived this once. We need your help,' Eva tells Julie. As the new trailer ramps up, we watch as a fisherman's bloody pursuit of each member of the clique intensifies, before finally ending on a chilling close-up of Julie, as she defiantly utters her iconic line, 'What are you waiting for?' 2025's I Know What You Did Last Summer is based on the 1997 film of the same name, which famously stars Hewitt, Prinze, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe. The original film, like the reboot, focuses on a close-knit group of friends who find themselves suffering the consequences of a hit-and-run they committed and covered up in the summer of 1996. Eagle-eyed fans will notice additional nods to the original film in the latest trailer. At one point, Danica is in the same Croaker Queen pageant hall where Helen Shivers (Gellar) begins her famous chase scene with the fisherman. While bringing Gellar back wasn't exactly possible — her character dies in the 1997 film — involvement from Hewitt and Prinze was crucial for the reboot's director and cowriter, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. 'There was no movie without them,' Robinson said during a screening of the trailer on June 14. The Someone Great and Do Revenge filmmaker pitched the reboot's premise to Hewitt and Prinze directly. From there, they worked closely on developing their characters today. 'This movie is about how trauma informs and shapes and changes you underneath all the fun screamy gags,' Robinson revealed, according to Variety. 'It was about figuring out exactly what these people would be like today, later in adulthood, having lived with what happened to them for as many years as they have.' For Robinson, paying homage to the original film was crucial. 'We never wanted to do anything for lack of a better word, 'gratuitous,' like for the sake of doing it,' she said. 'The way that we have built the lore of, especially the first movie, into this movie, allowed us to play with things from the original in a way that felt like it was a part of their story as well, rather than it being on top. It is very much woven within the fabric of this new installment.' Wonders, while chatting with Entertainment Tonight, gushed about getting the opportunity to share the screen with Hewitt and Prinze. 'We got the OGs back for this sequel, and they're so involved in every step of the way,' she said. 'I'm on a texting basis with Jennifer Love. She's a legend.' In I Know What You Did Last Summer, audiences will see Hewitt portray an edgier, more resolved Julie. She's no longer a teenager, Hewitt told Extra TV. She's living with her trauma as a woman in her 40s. 'I think she's figured out a way to put herself in a position in her life that she can deal every day with what happened to her in her teens,' she said. 'She's a little edgier. She's funny. She's funny in this movie, which I really appreciate. I think you just see that she's lived in this person for a while.'
UPI
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- UPI
Famous birthdays for June 18: Kim Dickens, Carol Kane
Movies // 14 hours ago 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' trailer recruits Freddie Prinze Jr. June 17 (UPI) -- A new trailer for the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" reboot features both Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. as they help a new group of teens outrun a killer.
