Jesse Metcalfe is reflecting on the very memorable experience of making John Tucker Must Die ahead of the film’s 20th anniversary next year.

“That whole experience is just kind of burned into my memory,” Metcalfe, 46, told PEOPLE at SIMKHAI’s fall/winter 2025 runway show during New York Fashion Week.

The 2006 teen comedy marked the actor’s big-screen debut after his breakthrough role in ABC’s Desperate Housewives. Metcalfe played the titular John Tucker, a popular, chauvinistic high school jock who becomes the target of a revenge plot when three girls (played by Ashanti, Sophia Bush and Arielle Kebbel) discover he has been secretly dating them all at the same time.

“There were some defining moments on that movie,” Metcalfe recalled.

He went on to cite a particular scene in which his character is tricked into wearing a lace thong only to be humiliated in front of his entire high school basketball team.

“Wearing women’s underwear in front of the entire cast and about 50 background players and crew,” Metcalfe said. “That was interesting.”

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Last year, Metcalfe reunited with Bush and Kebbel for a panel at Epic Cons Chicago, where he revealed the pressure he felt to keep up his chiseled physique while filming John Tucker Must Die.

“I was not eating, and I was working out three times a day,” he recalled, adding that he was hitting the gym “anytime that I was not on set.”

During the 2024 panel, Kebbel also revealed that she’s had a hand in writing a screenplay for a potential John Tucker sequel, which Metcalfe said he was excited to read.

“Do I get a chance to wear a thong again?” the actor asked.

“We wanted to talk to you about that,” Kebbel joked. “We were thinking you’d actually, like, make your own brand, endorse it. It’d be a whole thing.”

“I can’t wait to unleash this dad bod on the big screen,” Metcalfe joked.