Jennifer Love Hewitt had a difficult decision when it came to her return to television. More specifically, she had a tough time choosing between the offer to join the cast of CBS’s Criminal Minds and leaving her daughter Autumn behind.
“I’m definitely sort of flying by the seat of my pants,” she told E! Online . “You know, you’re a mom and everything from the moment they’re in your arms is flying by the seat of your pants. So you get very good at it very quickly… [Autumn] is being really brave and I’m being brave and we’re just sort of figuring it out.”
And while Jennifer Love Hewitt wasn’t necessarily “prepared” for the offer to join Criminal Minds — as previously reported by The Inquisitr — Love Hewitt is excited by the opportunity to play Kate Callahan, a top agent joining the FBI’s Behavior Analysis Unit.
Jennifer told Entertainment Weekly recently that Kate is no newbie when it comes to her work, something that appealed to the former Party of Five star.
“Kate is a really interesting woman. She comes to the BAU with her own experience, which I like. I wasn’t quite sure at first if I was going to be a newbie who hadn’t done this before. When they told me about her, I was really excited that she comes with her own background and talent. She had met the BAU team before in an interesting way, which they talk about in my first episode. It’s fun how they’ve all run into each other one other time before Kate gets added to the team. She has a lot of gumption. She’s very feisty. If she’s afraid of a bad guy, she doesn’t show it. She enjoys her job.”
Jennifer Love also revealed how this character is different than those she’s portrayed in her extensive TV past:
“For me, it’s completely different. Coming off of [‘The Client List’], which was so incredibly different, they couldn’t be more different characters. For [‘Ghost Whisperer’s’] Melinda, there wasn’t a bad guy. Melinda really came up against a lot of super scary people in a totally different way than Kate does. Kate comes up against real life, scary, creepy bad guys. For Melinda, most of the time those people ended up being dead and she was able to find empathy for them. Kate has absolutely no sensitivity for these people just because she believes in the right in people, doing things the right way and not hurting other people.”
Read the recap of Hewitt’s first episode of Criminal Minds here . And catch Jennifer Love Hewitt every Monday at 8 p.m. on CBS.