Jennifer Love Hewitt Talks Narrating ‘A Killer Among Friends’

Jennifer Love Hewitt realizes much of her work behind the camera shares a common theme.

“I feel like I am a person, in hopefully a healthy way, that finds themselves inspired by or interested in human stories of trauma,” she says.

In recent years, she’s found herself telling stories about people, often women, after the hardest moments of their lives, whether it’s through her “9-1-1” character; as Julie James in the sequel to “I Know What You Did Last Summer”; or as the narrator of the new docuseries “A Killer Among Friends.”

Hewitt says in an interview with TODAY.com, she found herself exploring this theme again and again “by accident.” But the similarities between her roles have never been more stark.

In 2025’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” Julie has long left Southport and is now a divorcée college psychology professor specializing in the study of — you guessed it — trauma. But she’s drawn back into the fray by Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), one of the group of 20-somethings being terrorized by the next killer to take up the fisherman’s mantle.

Without sharing too many spoilers, the film’s ambitious finale sees Julie return to Southport for the first time after years of avoiding it — and face a killer once again. (She quite literally voices her mettle with a reprise of her line, “What are you waiting for, huh?”)

“I Know What You Did Last Summer” hit theaters July 18. That same week, another one of Hewitt’s projects hit the small screen.

Hewitt is the narrator and executive producer of Investigation Discovery’s “A Killer Among Friends.” The docuseries premiered July 14, with new episodes airing each Monday on ID and streaming the next day on HBO Max.

The premiere episode, “Killer on Campus,” follows the 1994 slaying of University of Kentucky student Trent DiGiuro, which was the subject of a “Dateline” investigation in March 2019. The first scene shows one of DiGiuro’s friends, Sean, return for the first time to the off-campus house where DiGiuro was murdered.

Introducing the episode and the group of students at the center of it, Hewitt says, “In the real world you never truly know who you can trust. Something evil was coming for them.” Each episode will follow a friend group “haunted by a murder of one of their own,” the logline reads.

“(Trauma) seems to be a theme for me, and I’m not really sure why,” Hewitt says. “I seem to gravitate towards it. Or it seems to be my universal lesson. So I embrace it.”

A Role She’s Never Filled

“A Killer Among Friends” seemingly relates to the original premise of “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Even the posters for both projects feature a similar style, down to the title’s font size and shape.

“I think that’s probably why they thought of me, because I haven’t really been in the true crime space. I’ve definitely produced things before, but I’ve never been a narrator,” Hewitt says.

Hewitt’s narration moves the story along. She introduces each episode’s central conceit, and if you hear her voice mid-episode, prepare for a plot twist or major reveal.

Becoming the narrator involved learning a brand-new skill, “taking your face completely out of it, and trying with your voice to convey strength and fear,” she says.

“I’ve been doing this business now for 36 years, and so to find something new that I haven’t tried yet was exciting for me,” she adds.

But she has a confession.

“Truth be told, because I like to keep it real, I’m not a big true crime watcher,” she says. “Only because I get very freaked out by things very easily, and I’m a mom of three children, so I just like to not go there sometimes.

But reading the stories of the sources in “A Killer Among Friends” felt different, she says.

“It felt like these were stories that really held onto and captured an innocence and a human condition and a heart condition in the true crime space that maybe I hadn’t really seen before,” she says.

“I felt like that was what I could attach to,” she continues, “the vulnerability of our youth and the friend group angle in all of these stories, with these friends grappling with these things and being left behind and all these unanswered questions.”

Though the job marks a first for Hewitt, she cites one of her past roles with preparing her for the task: Melinda Gordon from “Ghost Whisperer.” In the CBS drama, which aired from 2005 to 2010, Melinda communicated with spirits and helped bring closure to people who had lost loved ones.

“I really did think about her a lot when I was narrating this,” Hewitt says. “My job in this was to not be on top of the story, or overdo the story, but to really just service these people’s stories and endings, however sad they might be. But to also somehow pay respect and provide closure.”

She also sees similarities between the narrator role and her “9-1-1” character, Maddie, who works as a Los Angeles dispatcher on the ABC drama.

“Sometimes people pick on me for Maddie being a crier as a dispatcher, and I always have to say, ‘It’s a TV show. I’m supposed to be giving you emotion.’ I know that if I really worked at 911, I would not be able to sob with people all the time,” she says.

But it was thinking about the reality of the dispatcher job that helped her while recording her lines in the booth.

“There were definitely a couple of times where I was reading things in the booth where I felt myself wanting to be emotional about it, and in my mind, had to remind myself that this was not the place,” she says. “I could feel that way later.”

‘My Universal Lesson’

Narrating “A Killer Among Friends” was far from easy.

“Knowing these stories are out there and happening to people, your heart breaks,” Hewitt says.

Asked how she puts that heaviness aside at the end of the day, Hewitt is blunt: “When you have three children, there is no unwinding.”

Hewitt and husband Brian Hallisay became parents in 2013 after welcoming daughter Autumn. She went on to have two sons, Atticus, born in 2015, and Aidan in 2021.

“People ask me this question all the time about ‘9-1-1,'” she says. “You literally go from darkness into sneezing out rainbows and Skittles. That is just your job.”

“But I do think that there is, thank God, a beautiful lift and light that is provided by my kids at the ends of days when I have to do heavy things, that I’m very grateful for,” she adds.

Hewitt says after finishing filming for “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” she went straight to narrating “A Killer Among Friends,” all while still filming for “9-1-1” Season 8. (As of at least July 24, filming for Season 9 is notably underway, per social media posts shared by the cast.)

It was this summer, in the course of doing interviews for the various projects, that Hewitt says she’s recognized the connecting factor of trauma in her work — Julie James as an “active trauma live-r”; Maddie, a survivor of kidnapping (twice!), postpartum depression, fire and more; a narrator who “pushes past my trauma of having to know these stories.”

“I’m 46 years old, I don’t know that I would have put that piece together before now,” she says.

And there’s her own trauma, which she says she experiences “all the time, in little, tiny ways.”

“My children have had trauma growing up in COVID and fires in L.A. and all those things,” she says. “I mean I just think it is something that we all have.”

Her approach to finding opportunities is to stay open.

“I don’t look super hard for the things that I’m in or that I’m a part of,” she says. “I really try to just stay open and know that the right things will find me, and they have so far.”

While she didn’t explicitly seek out stories of trauma, she’s found power in each story’s message. And she describes connecting to these roles, specifically to women “strong in their broken pieces,” like it’s a purpose, a calling.

“I think trauma has been seen as a weakness,” Hewitt says. “And I think my goal … in being the narrator of this show and showing how these people have continued to live life because they got the chance to — you know, trauma can also be a strength.”

“I think it is a beautiful, beautiful vulnerability to be able to say, ‘I have trauma, and I make it work for me every day,'” she adds. “‘Trauma and I hold hands, and we walk right on through it.’ … Hopefully I’m able to show, yes, they get knocked down, but they also get right back up.”