Freddie Prinze Jr. Joining ‘Nancy Drew’ Series On The CW Network

Actor Freddie Prinze Jr. will join the new CW series based on the Nancy Drew series of mystery novels, reported Variety.

Prinze will portray Nancy’s father, Carson Drew. Newcomer Kennedy McMahon will play the titular role of Nancy Drew. Leah Lewis (Charmed, The Good Doctor) will co-star as George, a tough girl from the wrong side of the tracks who becomes a suspect in the central murder case.

Variety reported that the Carson Drew character is a “dynamic attorney who has become estranged from Nancy following the recent death of his beloved wife – but his attempts to reconnect with his daughter run aground when Nancy’s murder investigation reveals unsettling secrets from Carson’s own past.”

The show will be set shortly after Nancy Drew’s high school graduation and her path towards college, which is derailed after a family tragedy keeps her from attending her dream school.

Prinze is a former teen heartthrob and star of the films She’s All That, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and the Scooby-Doo series of films.

He will celebrate his 18th wedding anniversary with former Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar in September of this year. The couple met when they co-starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer but did not begin dating until 2000. They are parents to a daughter and a son: Charlotte Grace and Rocky James.

Prinze had dated a handful of actresses before meeting Gellar but always had one concern about his dates; the women were all so worried about their weight they wouldn’t eat. He said to People Magazine that he knew Gellar was the one for him for this reason.

“Sarah came to dinner with me, and we sat down and she ate everything, including a crab that they let walk across the counter, then kill while it was alive in some oil and said, ‘It’s popcorn, try,'” he revealed. “And she ate it without even blinking, and I was like, ‘Yo, my girl is legit.'”

Prinze has largely stayed out of the public eye for the past several years, working on a cookbook titled “Back to the Kitchen: 75 Delicious. Real Recipes (& True Stories) From A Food-Obsessed Actor.” In 2017, Gellar also released her own cookbook titled “Stirring Up Fun with Food: Over 115 Simple, Delicious Ways to Be Creative in the Kitchen.”

In 2014, Gellar revealed to E News that Prinze was recovering from spinal surgery. The actor said in the same story that he had what he called “Cena surgery,” a quip he made in reference to WWE wrestler John Cena who underwent an operation to “surgically remove a large disk fragment compression on his spinal cord.”

A film version of the book Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase was released in theaters on March 15. The CW’s Nancy Drew is rumored to debut in the fall of 2019.