SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains massive spoilers for I Know What You Did Last Summer. Seriously, if you haven’t seen the film, you really shouldn’t be reading this… but proceed at your own risk!
We have seen a great number of legacyquels in the last 15 years, but none of them successfully pull off a twist like what audiences experience in writer/director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s I Know What You Did Last Summer. While it’s usually the case that legacy characters principally exist to tie the story of the new generation to the past, the new horror movie opts to go much bolder: while Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Julie James retains her Final Girl status, the film reveals that Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Ray Bronson has lost his mind and features him as one of two killers (the other being Sarah Pidgeon’s Stevie Ward).
It’s an unexpected and well-invited shock when it’s revealed in the third act, and one of my favorite parts of the movie (as I tease in my spoiler-free CinemaBlend review of I Know What You Did Last Summer). Not only does the development feel organic, but Freddie Prinze Jr. really sells it – which I learned during an interview with the actor was the result of him going deep emotionally to understand Ray’s journey from hero to villain.
How Ray Bronson Becomes A Killer In I Know What You Did Last Summer
For most of Ray Bronson’s screen time in 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, he seems like a pretty put together dude – albeit one with a couple of chips on his shoulder. He runs his own bar, and he seems like a positive mentor to Stevie, his employee, but it’s also made very clear that things didn’t end well in his marriage to Julie James, and he has long been upset that the town of Southport, North Carolina went above and beyond to sweep all of the murders that occurred in 1997 under the rug.
As it turns out, those chips on his shoulder should have been recognized as red flags. Ray’s relationship with Julie didn’t work out because of his seething anger, and the anger he has long harbored toward the town ends up not just being idle and self-harming. His rage ends up being infectious virus that he spreads to Stevie, and they work together to take revenge on Southport and Stevie’s former friends.
Freddie Prinze Jr. Examined His Friends’ Broken Relationships And Trauma To Get At The Heart Of What Happened To Ray
When a person experiences an extremely traumatic event, it has been proven that it is best for them to not just bottle up all of their feelings. If those emotions aren’t properly address, they can end up becoming toxic and do serious damage. Ray Bronson proves to be a dictionary-worthy case of his psychological phenomenon in the I Know What You Did Last Summer legacyquel, and it’s something in which Freddie Prinze Jr. found a lot of honesty as he was preparing for his performance.
Late last month, I had the pleasure of interviewing the actor alongside Jennifer Kaytin Robinson during the Los Angeles press day for his new film, and while digging into spoiler territory, I asked him about his view on what’s been going on with Ray since audiences last got to see him in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Prinze Jr. has been married for the last 23 years to his I Know What You Did Last Summer co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar, but he noted that he knows people who had troubled relationships a la Ray and Julie, and his character’s problems started with his inability to properly process being hunted by a serial killer as a teenager. Said the actor,
I have a lot of friends whose relationships didn’t work out for a plethora of reasons. And sometimes it’s trauma and not dealing with that trauma, and that that sort of shortens your fuse over years and little things start setting you off, and it’s not really connected to what just happened. It’s connected to something that happened years ago.
It’s a cliché, but the phrase “Hurt people hurt people” is a cliché for a reason: if an individual doesn’t properly process their own pain, they are more liable to inflict pain on others. In the cases of some people, that’s limited to emotional pain, but in the case of Ray Bronson, he’s skulking around Southport wearing a slicker and killing folks with a hook and a harpoon gun.
Freddie Prinze Jr. added that the material was heavy, but he has a great deal of fun getting the opportunity to explore the character and then apply what he had discovered in his performance:
There’s a lot of bringing that to work with you, which isn’t fun. But in between the words action and cut, it’s a blast because you get to kind of demonstrate it and execute it and show people what you’ve prepared, and then, hopefully, you’re able to kind of let all that go and see what happens in the moment. You know what I mean? It all depends on how the days flow. And it dictates on how far you go in a scene.
Concluding, the actor explained that Ray was a relatively put together guy when we got to see him through the events of the original I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer… but there was a point in the two-and-a-half decades that followed where he just snapped. When Freddie Prinze Jr. understood that and how to play it, it all clicked:
But once I knew the reason why and I knew how I could play a broken man – ’cause that’s what Ray is at this point. He’s not this blue collar hero anymore. He has been broken by this. He didn’t deal with it. And trauma either makes you or breaks you. I know people that it’s made stronger, and I know people that it’s broken in two, and this is so spoiler-y. But yeah. Hopefully this comes out after the movie. He’s a broken man, and this is the result.
If you’re curious how knowing about the dark journey of Ray Bronson impacts the viewing experience of I Know What You Did Last Summer, the new horror movie is now playing in theaters everywhere – having placed third at the box office in its opening weekend.
