Jennifer Love Hewitt feels 'proud' of 9-1-1 storyline
Jennifer Love Hewitt feels "proud" of '9-1-1's portrayal of postpartum depression.
The 43-year-old actress plays Maddie Buckley in the TV series, and she can relate to the struggles of her on-screen character, having been through three pregnancies herself and experienced "versions of" postpartum depression.
Jennifer - who has Autumn, eight, Atticus, six, and Aidan, six months - shared: "I knew when we started the storyline where it was going to end up. And taking the break to go have a real baby and then come back to it was strange and a little daunting.
"It was really important to us to tell the real story. Postpartum depression has been done on other shows, it's something that's out there. It's something that people talk about. But it's usually a lighter version of what that looks like. Or the diagnosis is lighter than what Maddie has dealt with."
Jennifer is glad that the makers of the show decided to tackle the issue, and she feels proud of how it's been dealt with.
The actress told 'Entertainment Tonight': "Hers is a really extreme version of what postpartum can cause in someone's life, heightened by having a baby in a pandemic on the show and everything else that she's been through as a character.
"So I was really excited and proud of the show and proud of Fox for really getting in there and telling this story for all the women who are out there that might be suffering from this at the moment or have had that in the past, because it's a real thing."
Jennifer also saw some similarities between the struggles of her character and her own real-life situation.
She said: "I was so very much in my own postpartum journey. Having to play Maddie in the middle of hers, which is a little bit different than mine, but having to do that every day - it was really hard.
"But it was also very cathartic and really interesting. I feel it kind of helped me in my own journey, sort of pushed through faster and be able to have a place to put it and to understand all those things that we could go through as women."
