9-1-1 boss and Jennifer Love Hewitt on shocking reveal of Maddie’s kidnapper and what’s next: ‘I wasn’t ready’

9-1-1 knows how to keep fans on their toes.

For weeks, the ABC drama has been teasing that Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Maddie would be kidnapped in the season 8 winter premiere — but, in a stunning twist, the assailant is revealed to be not the murderer she’d been dealing with, but the detective (guest star Abigail Spencer’s Det. Amber Braeburn) that Maddie and Athena (Angela Bassett) had been working with the whole episode.

Here, Hewitt and 9-1-1 showrunner and executive producer Tim Minear tell Entertainment Weekly the inspiration for the storyline, what it was like filming those intense 911 dispatcher phone calls, and how what’s to come will make Maddie’s previous kidnapping seem like a “a little stroll.”

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You often take inspiration from real-life headlines. Was that the case here?

TIM MINEAR: Yeah, this story is based on a real case that I think was from Minnesota many years ago of a serial killer who would call 911 and cry: “I’ve done it again. I can’t stop myself, you’ll find her body here….” It is a real thing. You can hear these calls on the internet, and we all thought that was super creepy. So that was the starting point of it. And then I just felt like it’d been a while since Maddie had been abducted, quite frankly. [Laughs] It felt like it was time to get her out of the house.

Those phone calls are pretty intense.

JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT: I was really excited about them. Thank God for Tim. I mean, truly, some people are afraid to do these things on TV. They’re afraid to put characters in these situations. I think that — although, ultimately, the audience always wants Maddie to be happy — for me, this is Maddie. This is who she is, this is how she came into the show. Maddie is a feral woman with a lot of gumption, who is a fighter and a survivor. She’s meant for these situations. She just is. And they’re really fun for me to play. I’ve not been handed these things by any other person other than Tim my entire career, and he really trusts me with these things. That said, they scare the s— out of me. Every time I’m like, “How am I going to pull this off?”

How did you pull them off? Did you hear the distorted voice already or was someone just reading lines off screen?

HEWITT: Abigail was great, and she played around with a bunch of different things, but no, I didn’t get to hear what it actually sounds like [in the final cut]. I tried to picture things in my mind, but I didn’t know. It’s usually our script supervisor who just acts their little butt off for me. For this episode, we filmed all of the calls at once. It was like 10 pages of stuff, and as it kind of grew…. Maddie is a person who has triggers, and at one point I said, “I really feel like he has to reference [Maddie’s daughter] Jee-yun.” He had to because — nobody knows about it in the call center at that point, but — I’m carrying a child. The second that he gets into that mama bear trigger, on top of having been a victim of violence, I think that’s what catapults her into that decision that she makes.

What did you think of Maddie telling the caller they should end their own life?

HEWITT: I think it’s ultimately crazy and not a well thought out decision on her part. But I think it’s the survivor in her saying, “I have to save all these other people that are going to come afterwards.” I don’t think, in the moment, she thinks of how much that will stay with her. And that’s where she is, I think, holding that kind of heaviness when she’s knocked over the head.

Let’s dig into that. Was it always the plan to have Det. Braeburn as the kidnapper?

MINEAR: Yeah, that was the plan from the beginning.

HEWITT: Well, when we started filming, we didn’t have the full script yet. We just had kind of little sections, and then we sort of found out after we had started where it was all going. So [Abigail and I] kind of got to be surprised together. And I think that actually helped us, because when we did the scenes in the precinct, we didn’t fully know what was happening yet. I kind of knew, but not to the full extent. So that kind of helped us not give anything away.

Now the secret is out, so what can fans expect in episode 10?

MINEAR: This was really the setup episode. Everything will be unearthed in the next episode. How involved is she? And why is she? And who was making those calls? All of that will be revealed in the next episode. It’s very tense, and I think possibly one of the darkest episodes we’ve done.

HEWITT: The audience is not ready. I wasn’t ready. It makes the Big Bear episodes look like [Maddie’s ex-husband] Doug and I went to lunch. We just look like a little stroll. We had some snacks. [Laughs] It’s very intense. It’s really crazy. It is a real study on unresolved trauma, people’s trigger points. I think to whatever extent people consider Maddie a fighter and a survivor, you really have no idea. But it was also so fun. It’s a really cool couple of episodes in that it’s driven by females. Females are fighting it out, females are fighting like hell, females leave each other. It’s directed by a female. It felt really cool. It felt like we were some badass bitches, as they say.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.