After Being Called “Unrecognizable” In Recent Photos, Jennifer Love Hewitt Says “Aging In Hollywood Is Really Hard”

After being called “unrecognizable” in recent photos, Jennifer Love Hewitt spoke out about aging in Hollywood, saying in a recent podcast appearance “It’s dangerous, I think, to say to women, ‘You can’t look like you’re not 22 to me anymore because I don’t know how to take that.’”

Hewitt shot to fame in the mid-1990s after appearing on the hit television show Party of Five from 1995 to 1999; movie roles in 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer and 1998’s Can’t Hardly Wait cemented her career. During the height of her fame (although her time starring on The Ghost Whisperer from 2005 to 2010 is a close second), Hewitt was a teenager and in her early twenties, and fans likely most associate her with what she looked like at that time.

But, news flash, we all age, even Hollywood actresses. “Aging in Hollywood is really hard,” Hewitt told Michael Rosenbaum on his podcast “Inside of You” (and per People). “It’s really hard, because you can’t do anything right.”

It all started when Hewitt took a selfie after getting her hair cut into a dark bob: “I was getting my hair done and I had not a stitch of makeup on, so I threw on a filter,” she said. “And it was just a filter that, at the time, looked nice in the light at the salon. I really gave it no thought.” After she posted said photo, Hewitt said “a bunch of people were like, ‘Jennifer Love Hewitt is unrecognizable.’ And then another place was like, ‘She’s unrecognizable and so she’s gone to filters because she doesn’t want us to know how bad she actually looks now in her forties.' And I was like, ‘This is crazy, right?’”

To poke fun at haters, Hewitt then went full tilt boogie, posting more photos—this time with “over-the-top, crazy” filters on, which were met with even more vitriol. “I was like, ‘All natural, no filter,’ like, trying to make fun of it, and then they came after me for that and they were like, ‘Well, now she’s just defending herself,'" she said. “And I realized, I was like, ‘I can do no right.’”

After Rosenbaum asked her why she pays so much attention to people “who have nothing better to do than to put you down,” she responded, “Because to pretend that we don’t is a lie,” adding that the “only reason those people bother me” is because “I’m a mother of a girl.”

Yet, she said, the attention is not all negative; she told Rosenbaum “I will say, the majority of people have been very kind to me. They’ve grown up with me. They look like I do now. We’re all getting lines and maybe in menopause and who knows what else is coming for us.”

Hewitt shared that even “at 23, 24, 25, I didn’t feel self-confident. I felt watched. I felt like I had to be everything for everybody all the time. I was called sexy before I ever knew what being sexy was. Like, I was 17 years old on the cover of Maxim, and I had no idea why I was on the cover of Maxim. That girl was so insecure and so confused and trying her best.”

Twenty years later, Hewitt wants to write a different narrative—one more self-assured. “I’m 44, and this is what I look like,” she added.