Jennifer Love Hewitt recently had a special visitor on the set of 9-1-1.
In this week’s issue of PEOPLE, the 45-year-old actress talks about how her 9-year-old son Atticus got to spend the day with her at work on a day off from school.
“It was so cool to see what I get to do for a living through his eyes,” Hewitt says. “We got to have lunch together in my trailer, and I had a really difficult scene that I had to do where I was crying and he was just rubbing my back at the end, and he was telling me how proud he was. He said, ‘Mommy, you work so hard. Thank you for working so hard.” It was very sweet.”
Hewitt says all three of her children — Atticus, Autumn, 11, and Aidan, 3, whom she shares with husband Brian Hallisay — are “huge.” 9-1-1 fans “completely separated from me.”
“I didn’t ask them to watch it,” she says. “They actually only watched it because some of their friends wanted to see it, and now they love it.”
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Hewitt joined the TV drama in 2018 as Maddie Han for season 2. When she first got the call about the project, “they said, ‘Hey, they’re looking for a Jennifer Love Hewitt type for this show,'” she remembers. . “I thought, ‘Well, me.’ am that kind. ”
She was sold when she heard who Maddie was.
“I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I have to do this. She’s different,'” she says. “It was absolutely amazing.”
Since her first day 9-1-1 (which returns to ABC on March 6), Hewitt says she has made it clear that she needs to be “a mother first and an actress second.”
“They actually allow me to do that right there on that show,” she says. “I mean, they know I’m a hard worker and I love being there, and I give it my all when I’m there, but they’re very nice and loving about the fact that I want to be with my kids. children feel like they come first in our small world.”
But now that her two oldest children are “tweenagers,” she says they want to “send mommy to work.”
‘They wish I could just be there 9-1-1 all the time because they think it’s the coolest show ever,” she says. “It’s just the best job, really. It’s great.”
Autumn, Atticus and Aidan recently got to star in the new Lifetime Christmas movie with their parents The holiday junkiewhich premiered on December 14. The film was inspired by Hewitt’s love of the holidays and the grief of losing her mother Pat to cancer at age 67 in 2012.
“Aidan is in the little snow scene, and Autumn and Atticus are in two scenes, so it was a real family affair,” says Hewitt. “It’s like our little Christmas love letter that we’ll always have.”
Hewitt continues to tell her family’s story in her new book Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Sadness, Joy, Celebration, and Making Every Day Magical.
“I’m really proud of the book,” she says. “It was hard to write about sadness and quite scary to put my kids on the cover and show our lives and everything, but it was exciting to write about who we are and what we believe in, hoping that it inspires people.”
For more on Jennifer Love Hewitt, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.