Not just a "party" girl
Jennifer Love Hewitt parlays TV success into movie stardom
"Party of Five" star Jennifer Love Hewitt (with Scott Wolf "Party of Five" star Jennifer Love Hewitt has two films c... "Party of Five" star Jennifer Love Hewitt has two films c...
Entertainment
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On September 30, Sarah Reeves will learn the truth about her birth mother on Fox's ``Party of Five,'' the popular family-in-crisis saga that begins its fifth weepy season on September 16.
The cast and crew made their annual trek to San Francisco last week for location shots. At the Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Theater at the University of San Francisco (where Sarah expects to find her biological mother, who is supposed to be a Bay Area actress), the crew sets up the lights.
Jennifer Love Hewitt, who plays the wise and patient Sarah, and co- star Scott Wolf, who plays her off- again, on-again boyfriend, Bailey Salinger, sit and wait (for hours) in the auditorium between takes.
Wolf is absorbed in a paperback. Love is absorbed in her new boyfriend, Carson Daly, an MTV video jockey, who lives in San Francisco. They sit in the back of the auditorium, his arm wrapped around her slim shoulders. If Daly were not around, Hewitt would be reading ``The Enchantment of Faerie Realm,'' which, she explains, all smiles and wide eyes, ``explores the thoughts of people who believe and disbelieve in fairies and that they can make magic happen.''
With the teen market so important in film and TV right now, the 19-year-old actress -- she was on Entertainment Weekly's second annual ``It'' list this summer -- is one of Hollywood's current pin-ups.
She is poised, energetic and ambitious with a drive that is surprising even by Hollywood standards. The balance, she says, comes from living with her mother rather than on her own.
Like almost everyone else in the ``PO5'' cast, Hewitt's cell phone jingles constantly with job offers. She was in this summer's ``Can't Hardly Wait,'' and this fall, she's in ``I Still Know What You Did Last Summer'' and the forthcoming ``The Suburbans'' with Ben Stiller, in which she plays a sexpot record executive who gives an '80s band a second shot.
When ``PO5'' goes on hiatus this spring, Hewitt will shoot two more films. One is an ABC movie about Audrey Hepburn, starring Hewitt, who with her delicate bones, heart- shaped face and big eyes can probably pull it off. ``It's been my dream for so long to play her,'' Hewitt said. ``I'm so excited.''
She has written a treatment for a feature film called ``Cupid's Love,'' about a wedding planner (Hewitt) with a bad track record who falls in love with a client. That one she dreamed up herself, quite literally.
``I had a dream about it, and wrote a treatment in about an hour and a half and pitched it to some producer friends, who took it all over L.A. We're going with New Line Cinema.''
Hewitt can also sing well and has recorded three CDs of R&B tunes, including one song she wrote herself. She's too busy to make a fourth recording. On September 10, she will be a presenter at the MTV Music Video Awards.
But at the moment she must get into the mind of Sarah. After long delays on the set, Hewitt is called to take her mark. The season before last, Sarah met her birth mother for the first time, then lost track of her. This season, she tries to reconnect. She will hear some bad news. On each take, Hewitt's body language changes every so slightly, and naturally she can puddle up on cue.
``She is sweet, cooperative, talented, a total professional, and I know I sound like her press agent,'' said director Steve Robman. ``I think her dark side shows up when she puts peanut butter on her pretzels.''
Everyone on the set calls her ``Love.'' Hewitt joined the cast during the show's second season when she was 16, just as the program found its audience. Her popularity has taken her character from an incidental member of the ensemble to practically a member of the Salinger family, as she and Bailey have come full circle and are romantically linked again. The show has been picked up for a sixth season.
``Sarah will be going through a lot of changes this season,'' Hewitt says. ``The major thing is how she copes with her sense of feeling alone.'' During those scenes, she will be strictly acting, she says.
She has just moved into a luxurious new house in Toluca Lake with her mother. ``I have a new, really big room,'' she says, sounding like the teenager she is.
``In the morning and at night, my life is rooted in reality,'' she says. ``When I come home, there is the smell of chicken soup or macaroni and cheese or pizza. I have chores, I have to clean out the cat box.''
Moving out is not on the agenda, new love or not. ``I don't see that happening for a really long time,'' Hewitt says, ``It would kill me not to be able to cuddle with my mother at night. I'm just not ready yet.''
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