9-1-1's Jennifer Love Hewitt on Her Character's Future Outside the Call Center

ABC’s 9-1-1 returns Thursday, September 26 with a buzzworthy opener to its eighth season as 22 million killer bees are accidentally released in Los Angeles.

Helping first responders navigate the chaos is Jennifer Love Hewitt’s empathetic 9-1-1 operator, Maddie. Hewitt recently gave us the 4-1-1 on 9-1-1.

Television Academy: When season seven ended, Maddie and her husband Chimney [Kenneth Choi] — who already have a toddler, Jee [Bailey and Hailey Leung] — became foster parents to Mara [Askyler Bell]. As a former child actor, what’s it like working with kids?

Jennifer Love Hewitt: Taking on Mara is maybe my favorite thing that Maddie and Chimney have ever done on the show. I just love it. It's so them. It's such a beautiful thing to do for their friendship [with Mara’s prospective adoptive parents Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Karen (Tracie Thoms)]. I absolutely adore and am so grateful for the Hen-Karen-Maddie-Chimney friendship that’s been allowed to blossom in season seven, and now eight. Working with the kids is really fun for me, because I remember acting at those ages — being rushed off to school, all those things. It's really fun to work with them. I love our little family scenes.

Maddie rarely has big action scenes like other cast members, but occasionally gets out of the call center—like when her abusive ex, Doug [Brian Hallisay], abducted her in the second season. What’s more challenging: shooting intense action scenes, or reacting to unseen callers?

Shooting the action scenes. It's funny, Kenny and I have this conversation a lot on the set. I'm like, “I don't know how you guys film all the crazy stuff that you do.” And he’s like, "I don't know how you sit and stare at nothing, talk to no one, and sob. How you do that?" I think Ghost Whisperer oddly prepared me for Maddie, because in that show nearly every scene we did, I had to do once with actors, and again while I was standing there talking to myself so they could do POVs of what other people in the world were seeing when Melinda Gordon was supposedly talking to ghosts. In five-and-a-half years of Ghost Whisperer, I got really good at talking to myself. But those calls are challenging when you have to do them 18 different times!

Do you ever run out of tears?

[Laughs] I feel like my eyes are trained for it. Sometimes I'll sit down to do a call, and someone will say, "Wait, are your eyes welling up?" And I'm like, "At this point, they're doing it without me. They see the computer screen, they know I'm in the chair, and they assume something's wrong." It's hilarious.

Over the last two seasons, I’ve had to go to the eye doctor because of clogged tear duct issues. When I go in, they're like, "We think you're maybe crying too much at work.” I found a T-shirt that says “I cry at work,” and always wear it when I go in early to do 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 mom, what did it mean to be able to play out that struggle and have the time to do it justice?

I was so excited when they said we were doing it. I’m proud of the way we did it, because I feel like sometimes on television you'll dip into storylines, and then right before it gets too messy, you dip out. We really sat in all the hard, dark, messy parts of postpartum. Maddie's postpartum was incredibly complicated by the life that she’d lived before [as a domestic abuse survivor] and her body's response to trauma—she’d been through so much at that point. She was a bubbling well of emotions, anyway, so adding a tough pregnancy on top of that was hard for her.

The crazy part about filming that whole storyline is that we started while I was pregnant with my son, Aidan. It was very weird to feel in my real life such joy and excitement, but then at work to have to go so deep into sadness and feeling lonely. It was all happening during Covid, so there was this sort of loneliness, I wasn't able to be around people the way I’d been around people in my other pregnancies, I had to keep myself and the baby safe. When we came back to do the “Boston” episode, in real life I was fully in the throes of my own postpartum, so it was really hard. But it was [also] beautiful because I realized that I was given, by my 9-1-1 family, an opportunity to let go of what I was feeling and give that to Maddie. I think her story helped a lot of people — I got a lot of really beautiful notes and DMs from people who felt touched by that storyline.

9-1-1’s drama is balanced by humor. What’s one of Maddie’s funniest moments?

The Bachelor episode [episode 100, “Buck, Bothered and Bewildered”] was one I loved — Josh [Bryan Safi] and Maddie are both Bachelor fans and got the call from The Bachelor mansion. We're trying to see who's in the background [of a video chat]. That was really funny, and Tim [Minear, 9-1-1 co-creator, writer, showrunner] is really funny. I’m always like, "Oh, this is a Tim line for sure, because it's so funny.”

And off-camera, everybody on the show is hilarious. We have a naturally funny, lighthearted group of people for such a dramatic show.

You’ve played memorable characters in Party of Five, Ghost Whisperer and I Know What You Did Last Summer. What makes Maddie special to you?

I feel like Maddie coming to me at this age — a grown up who’s had things in my life that truly broke me, like losing my mom [in 2012] — I was able to access her broken parts a little easier than if those things had not happened to me. I also think, as we grow older, we're able to be more raw with our emotions. We don't overthink things like we did when we were in our 20s, or at least I don't. This is a great age for me to play someone like Maddie, because I have no fear of really digging into it and playing all the messy parts.

You have a new book coming in December, Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Grief, Joy, Celebration, and Making Every Day Magical. How did it come about?

When my mom passed, one of my first random thoughts was, "Oh my gosh, I'm never gonna know magic again." The kind of magic that my mom created for me as a kid was the magic of love, deep thoughtfulness, silly moments and fun. When I started my family, I realized I’d inherited that magic. She’d left it behind, and I just had to grab it and infuse it into my own family. That's really where the book title came from. I’d been waiting to find a way to truly honor her.

9-1-1 airs Thursdays on ABC.