Interview: Jennifer Love Hewitt Discusses Maddie’s Role in the ‘9-1-1’ Season Ten Opener and Big Career Decision

At the end of 9-1-1 season nine, we saw Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Maddie Buckley-Han stepping into a leadership position at the call center after her supervisor had a stroke. This allowed her to have a major presence in the tenth season’s opening emergency and how it was handled.

“I sit most of the time as not the hero at all,” she expressed. “I’m a hero for that five seconds for whoever’s on the phone, and that’s sort of the life of a dispatcher. I believe dispatchers do something very heroic, which is keep the people okay and give them that voice that sometimes is the last voice they ever hear, or it’s the voice that gets them to safety. But really, in the story of the 118 and the 911 of it all, the dispatchers aren’t normally the heroes. And so, it was really nice in the first three to play the person that could essentially say, I did a little bit of something heroic. So I was happy for that. I was happy for that for all the dispatchers in the world, but also for all of us in the call center. It was really fun. We all had a great time kind of high-fiving each other and feeling like we had done something good for a second. So it was cool.”

While this storyline definitely allowed Maddie to shine as we began the new season, by the third episode, she makes an unexpected choice about what she wants to do with her career moving forward.

“I’ve had a hard time, if I’m being honest, transitioning back to just being a dispatcher again,” Hewitt shared. “For me, I want to show that Maddie’s brought a little bit of management back with her, and that maybe there’s a part of her that’s sort of either taking the calls in a new way or listening in a new way. I think, particularly with [episode four] and that sort of self-doubt moment, it was less about, am I a good dispatcher, and it’s more about, how do you return? How do you go back to that chair in this moment, and knowing all that I know now as a manager and all of those things, how do I just take the call? How do I ever trust my instincts again after the volcano? Really, I think that was more what that was about for her, and we saw a little bit of her settling back in. I think as the calls go on, it will feel more and more like Maddie’s just back at being a dispatcher. I, ultimately, think that that’s her safe place, and I think Maddie doesn’t do well without her safety places. So I understand why she returned there.”

Watch Awards Radar’s full video interview with the actress below, where we talk about her thoughts on becoming a dispatcher again, what that journey will look like, the symbolism in Maddie’s first calls back, what fans can expect from her highly anticipated scenes with Eddie, and much more.

New episodes of 9-1-1 air Thursdays at 8 PM ET on ABC and stream on Hulu.