Nobody told the little girl who her co-star was. Jennifer Love Hewitt was 10 years old, booked for an L.A. Gear commercial, and she figured she’d be working with “a fun kid named Michael.”
Then she got to the set. The grown-ups were “super serious,” she remembered, and everything was “hush-hush,” with protocols for everybody. Her co-star turned out to be Michael Jackson.
Decades later, Jimmy Kimmel put a photo from that shoot up on the screen during her visit to “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in September 2018. “It’s really Michael Jackson,” Hewitt said. “I was 10 years old. I got to spend the day with him doing an L.A. Gear commercial.”
She even remembered the shoes. “All the shoes had the Michael Jackson buckle on them,” she said.
The sneaker company had signed Michael to a huge endorsement deal in 1989, with estimates running as high as $20 million, UPI reported. Hewitt, born in February 1979, already knew the brand. At nine she’d joined the Texas Show Team, an L.A. Gear dance troupe, a year before she moved to Los Angeles to act and sing.
So she could keep up. “We spent the whole day together, we were dancing together,” she told Kimmel. “He taught me to do his up on the toes thing.”
There was one problem. She couldn’t stay. “At the end of the day I had to go to this charity function,” she said, so her part of the shoot wrapped early. That’s the part of the day she’s never forgotten. In the clip below, listen for how she describes the set before Michael walked in, and who she was expecting to meet.
Jennifer Love Hewitt tells Jimmy Kimmel about her day with Michael
This is the official “Jimmy Kimmel Live” clip. She explains who she thought her co-star would be at about 0:35, gets to the dancing at 1:29 and the charity function at 1:36.
So what did Michael do?
Before she left, Michael had something to tell her. “You don’t know how important it is that you’re doing something that’s special and important for other people,” he told her. “Never lose that. Always be that person.”
Her answer was pure kid. “I was like, okay, yes, sir,” she told Kimmel.
He wasn’t finished. That night Michael made what Hewitt called “a very big donation” to the charity function she was headed to, and he “sent a check in my name,” she said, “on my behalf.”
She still sounds a little stunned by it. “I just thought that was extraordinary because he’s Michael Jackson,” she said, as quoted by Toofab. “He didn’t have to do that.” She told TIME it was “something I wouldn’t have been able to do at the time.” Michael’s advice comes at about 1:46 in the clip, and the check story follows at 1:59.
They stayed in touch after that day. Hewitt and her mom were invited up to Neverland, she said, and one year they went for Thanksgiving. What she remembers best is the kid stuff: a giant candy store on the property handing out fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, and a Ferris wheel.