Yahoo News 9-1-1's Jennifer Love Hewitt nervous to return in emotional episode
9-1-1 will finally see the return of a familiar face as Maddie Buckley is making an emotional comeback after dealing with postpartum depression.
The new mum struggled after giving birth to Jee-Yun, deciding it wasn't safe for her to be around her baby and leaving.
Jennifer Love Hewitt, who has been playing Maddie since the show's second season, said to TVLine she hoped fans would be happy with the conclusion.
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"I hope that it's enough, I really do," she said. "I've had a genuine fear of that, so I'm nervous about Monday (March 28, when the episode airs).
"In real life, [the fans] know that Maddie left so I could go have my baby, but it's important to know about Maddie – and I think I say this in a later episode – that she's a fugitive. She has literally spent her whole life, since she was a kid, running.
"She ran from telling Buck the truth about their brother, she ran from a difficult relationship with her parents, she ran from an abusive marriage. Then she ran into a new relationship, into a pandemic head-on as a pregnant woman, and then ran away again with postpartum depression.
"Hopefully people will understand that she left to truly keep her daughter safe from someone that felt unsafe. She had to do that to get better and to stop running. Maybe now she'll be able to put herself back together and not spend the rest of her life that way."
Jennifer also spoke about her off-screen relationship with Kenneth Choi, who plays her partner Chimney on the show, and how it affects their character portrayal.
"He and I are very close, and he's very close with my family – my kids call him Uncle Kenny," she said. "We're very supportive of each other off camera and in life, so I really missed him. We missed playing Chimney and Maddie together.
"We care about them as much as the fans do. We're genuinely invested. So when we saw each other for the first time on camera, that was wild," she said, adding that the director asked them to save some of that emotion for the camera.
"It was nice getting back together, and we had a lot of fun in the second half of the season getting to play out their story."
9-1-1 airs on FOX in the US and Sky Witness in the UK.
Further information about postnatal depression is available via organisations including the NHS, Mind, the Mental Health Foundation and APNI.
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