ABC’s 9-1-1 returns Thursday, September 26, with a thrilling season eight opener as 22 million killer bees are accidentally released in Los Angeles.
Jennifer Love Hewitt’s empathetic 9-1-1 dispatcher, Maddie, helps first responders navigate the chaos. Hewitt recently gave us the 4-1-1 scoop on 9-1-1.
Television Academy: When season seven ended, Maddie and her husband Chimney [Kenneth Choi] — who already had a toddler, Jee [Bailey and Hailey Leung] — became foster parents to Mara [Askyler Bell]. As former child actors, what was it like working with kids?
Jennifer Love Hewitt: Taking on Mara was probably my favorite thing Maddie and Chimney have ever done on the show. I loved it. It was so much like them. It was so great to do it because of their friendship [with Mara’s future adoptive parents Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Karen (Tracie Thoms)]. I really loved and am so grateful that the Hen-Karen-Maddie-Chimney friendship was allowed to blossom in season seven and now season eight. Working with the kids was really fun for me, because I remember acting at that age—being rushed to school, all that stuff. Working with them was really fun. I love our little family scenes.
Maddie rarely gets the big action scenes like the other actors, but sometimes she comes out of the switchboard—like when her abusive ex, Doug [Brian Hallisay], kidnaps her in season two. What was more challenging: shooting intense action scenes or reacting to unseen callers?
Shooting action scenes. It’s funny, Kenny and I had this conversation a lot on set. I was like, “I don’t know how you guys shoot all the crazy scenes that you do.” And he was like, “I don’t know how you can sit there and stare into nothing and not talk to anyone and sob. How do you do that?” I think Ghost Whisperer weirdly prepared me for Maddie, because on that show, almost every scene we did, I had to do one take with the actors, and then another take where I was standing there talking to myself so they could get a perspective of what the rest of the world was seeing when Melinda Gordon was supposedly talking to the ghost. Over the five and a half years of Ghost Whisperer, I got really good at talking to myself. But those calls were so hard when you had to do them 18 different times!
Do you ever run out of tears?
[Laughs] I feel like my eyes are trained to do that. Sometimes I sit down to make a call, and someone will say, “Wait, are you tearing up?” And I’m like, “They’re doing it without me right now. They see the computer screen, they know I’m sitting in the chair, and they think something’s wrong.” It’s funny.
The last two seasons, I had to go to the ophthalmologist for a clogged tear duct issue. When I came in, they were like, “We think maybe you’re crying too much at work.” I found a T-shirt that said “I cry at work” and I always wear it when I come in early to shoot sad scenes, because it makes me laugh.
9-1-1 never shies away from serious storylines, like Maddie’s postpartum depression in seasons 4 and 5. As a mother, what does it mean to be able to show that struggle and have the time to do it justice?
I was so excited when they said we were going to do it. I’m proud of how we did it, because I feel like sometimes on television, you get so immersed in the storylines, and then right before it gets too messy, you pull back. We really sat in on all the difficult, dark, messy parts of postpartum. Maddie’s postpartum was so complicated by the life she had lived before [as a victim of domestic violence] and her body’s reaction to the trauma—she was going through so much at that point. She’s a roller coaster of emotions anyway, so adding a difficult pregnancy to that was hard for her.
The crazy part about shooting that whole storyline was that we started when I was pregnant with my son Aidan. It was weird to feel so happy and excited in real life, and then have to sink into sadness and loneliness when I went to work. It was all during Covid, so there was a sense of loneliness, I couldn’t be with people the way I was with people in my other confession, I had to keep myself and the baby safe. When we came back to do the “Boston” episode, I was in postpartum pain in real life, so it was really hard. But it was [also] beautiful because I realized that my 9-1-1 family gave me the opportunity to let go of what I was feeling and give that to Maddie. I think her story has helped a lot of people — I get a lot of notes
