On Tuesday, Jan. 7, Pacific Palisades resident Jennifer Love Hewitt awoke at 3 a.m.

“It was supposed to be my kids’ first day back at school from the Christmas break,” the actress and mother of three recalls. “I woke up and I’d had a dream that a firefighter was knocking on our door.”

She continues: “The firefighter told me that there was a fire and we had to get out. And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘You don’t see the flames? You don’t smell smoke?’ And I said, ‘No,’ and I shut the door. And when I shut the door in the dream, I woke up that morning on Tuesday.”

The dream really rattled Hewitt, who’s played a 911 dispatcher on Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s procedural drama 9-1-1 since 2018. “It’s fire season in L.A., but there was nothing going on at that time,” she says. “I’m a person who listens to their gut, and something in my gut felt very weird. I shared the dream with my family that morning, and my kids kind of laughed it off. They were like, ‘Oh, Mommy’s being kooky.’ And we moved on, but it really stayed with me.”

Later that morning, she mentioned the dream on the phone to a friend. “I said, ‘This just really freaked me out.’ She goes, ‘Well, knowing you, you’d have a whole list of things that you would take with you if you had to evacuate for a fire.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m type A, I do have that.’ And I said, ‘You know what? I’m actually going to just start looking at that, and maybe that’ll take care of my anxiety from this dream.’”

She pulled up the list. “And as I was looking at that on my phone, I got a text message from my husband, who said, ‘I’m on my way to the kids’ school. A fire has broken out in the back of the school and they’re being evacuated.’”

She raced into the living room of her home, and from the window, could see flames. “And I knew we had to go — it was not a situation like we’ve had a million times. Being an L.A. girl, you wait it out, and you see what happens, and it never quite turns into anything. Again, something about this day just felt different for me.”

Hewitt and her husband, actor Brian Hallisay, packed quickly. “We did not take very many things — some photographs that I had already started preparing based on that list that I was looking at,” she says. “And we grabbed our dogs. My husband was like, ‘Let’s just get in the car.’ And I was like, ‘No, I really feel like we need to take both cars.’”

They separated and followed each other. “As we were sitting on Temescal in that first wave of people trying to get out, you just watched the smoke turn from white and billowy,” she says. When we left our house, there was this giant plume of smoke framing our house. And it just got darker and darker. And when I looked back the last time leaving our neighborhood, it was in black smoke, like that was it. And I just felt very grateful that I had gotten whatever message I needed to get from my gut that morning and that we got out.”

Hewitt and her family went to a hotel. “Which is where we were for a couple of days, and now it’s a month later, and we’ve been in a bunch of hotels,” she says. “We’ve been in incredible friends’ houses. For us now, it’s just about figuring out where we can be. We’re putting one foot in front of the other. My kids did lose their school. We lost our whole community. And it’s just been really surreal. It has been truly heartbreaking and it’s something that I still kind of can’t believe, if I’m being honest.”

Born in Texas, Hewitt — who turned 46 last month — moved to L.A. with her mother on her 10th birthday. “I was just coming out here for a month to try to be in the entertainment industry and see how it would go,” she says. “But I just fell in love with it, and it worked out, and I never went back.”

She grew up in the Valley — starting with an apartment they found on that fated first day. “We literally were on the 405 freeway on my 10th birthday, we pulled off Barham, and got a place at the Oakwood Apartments — which is infamous for child actors and entertainers,” says Hewitt. The actress and singer found a steady stream of work, appearing as a cast member on Disney’s Kids Incorporated (1989-1991) and a choir member in 1993’s Sister Act 2. She later built a following by starring in Fox’s Party of Five (1995-1999), the 1997 horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer (and sequel), 1998 teen comedy Can’t Hardly Wait, CBS’s Ghost Whispers (2005-2010) and Lifetime’s 2010 film The Client List, in the racy role of a prostitute that resulted in a Globe nom. She also released four albums — all while calling Toluca Lake home.

“Then after my mom passed, 12 years ago, I was like, ‘I need to do something else — I need to be in a different part of the city, and not stay in all of our memories,’” she says.

Hewitt had always wanted to live in Pacific Palisades. “My husband — who I was dating at the time — lived on the Westside, and we went to the Palisades on a date,” she recalls of Hallisay, with whom she co-starred from 2012-2013 on Lifetime drama series The Client List. “We thought it would be fun to go look and see if we had the same taste in houses. And we found this house, and we both loved it, and we took a picture in it, and I said to him, jokingly, ‘Well, if this works out, one day we’re going to live in this house.’ And not long after that, we found out that I was pregnant with our daughter, and we put an offer in on that house.” Hewitt and Hallisay got married in November 2013, and their daughter was born shortly after — followed by their two sons.

“And that house, unfortunately, is no longer standing as of the last month,” Hewitt says, “but it was where we started our family. It was really beautiful and just such a neat experience to live there, and be a part of the Palisades.”

Hewitt has since returned to the area. “I have no words … it was really a lot to see,” she says. “A friend of mine put it beautifully and said, ‘It’s like the Palisades died and we’re all in grief.’ It looks like an entire area that just doesn’t exist except for these tiny little pockets. You really can look at it and see where the wind shifted and changed paths. It’s wild to see, because you’ll see these places that are standing and Christmas decorations are still up — where people hadn’t taken that stuff down yet — and then for miles, nothing exists behind it. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

But she’s observed good things, too: “The silver lining has been the most amazing spirit of the city I’ve ever seen, and really kind people doing amazing things to keep all of us going,” she says. “There are shops opening their doors and helping people with percentages off to just fill their closets again, and food, and the city has done such a beautiful job of reaching out to people.”

Hewitt wanted to pitch in as well. “I really wanted my kids to see that in these times, when it feels very much like we’re stuck in our own story, taking pain and channeling it into something that’s for a greater good just moves your heart forward,” she says. “I didn’t want them to just see me sitting and crying and worrying. I really wanted them to see that we could be active in this time.”

She started brainstorming: “When a city is in crisis like this, it’s important to put money back into the city,” she says. “And so that’s where my head went. I was like, ‘I need to team up with a small business, and I need to give them love, but I also want to give love back to the city, and I need to be able to put this aching feeling in my brain and my heart into something active.’ And so, I was sitting there, and I was like, ‘Gosh, I love Los Angeles so much. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, my middle name is Love.’ I love Los Angeles. Love Angeles. That’s what we’re doing.”

She thought to approach Chevy Berndt’s loungewear and accessories brand BFFs & Babes — “they’ve done such beautiful things before” — and sent them a DM. “I was like, ‘Listen, I don’t even know if you have the bandwidth to do this right now, but I want to do something.’” And a friend put her in touch with the nonprofit Baby2Baby, which was distributing emergency supplies for children. “Within an hour, we had the mockup of the shirts and the hat,” she says.

They created printed sweatshirts (starting at $50) and trucker hats (starting at $25) in white, beige and blue boasting the words “Love Angeles” inside hearts, with 100% of proceeds benefiting Baby2Baby. The arm of the sweatshirt is customizable — and supporters have added phrases like “Valley Girl,” “Palisades Strong” or “Sending love from New York.” “At that point, so many parts of the city were on fire,” Hewitt says. “I was like, ‘It’ll give people the chance to shout out to their area,’ because what’s beautiful about L.A, is so many little parts of the city have their own story.”

Immediately, Hewitt began to feel better. “I just felt, for the first time in those early days, that I had this forward momentum in a time where nothing was able to move forward — because we weren’t able to do anything about the circumstances. And the firefighters were still in extraordinary circumstances. Everything was in flux, but this felt like I knew what I was doing and [gave me] purpose. And again, it was a great lesson for my kids. In those next couple of days, they were able do their own things. Like my daughter started making bracelets for people and saying, ‘Let’s just give these out as a smile to somebody.’ It made us all feel like we were doing something poignant.”

The items were also a hit — and they’ve raised over $50,000 for Baby2Baby. “And it’s been fun,” Hewitt says. “On Instagram, everybody keeps posting pictures of what their cuff says, or them with their hats on, and it’s been really special. And my kids love seeing it: They’re like, ‘Mommy, that’s your part.’ And I’m like, ‘That is — that is my very small contribution to a very big story.’”

To meet demand, they created additional items. “We did add key chains to the collection as a symbol [of] hope, to remind people that there will be a key to another home filled with memories in another area — or back in the Palisades one day in the future,” she says. They also recently added more sweatshirts and dad hats, in new shades of red, navy and green. “We’ve also had some interest from some retail shops to help carry it and raise money for Baby2Baby,” Hewitt says, “so we’re hoping that that will happen. The goal is to keep going as long as we can. There’s so much work to still be done in the city — it’s going to keep going for a very long time.”

As for her future plans, Hewitt is still figuring it out given the climate of uncertainty. “For 14 days, every time I woke up, there was a new fire somewhere,” she recalls. “I would go to sleep every night and pack up our tiny little bins that we had, our few things, every night, because I didn’t want to get caught leaving something else behind if we had to move in the middle of the night. We were all like, ‘We can’t ever really get settled anywhere,’ because it was constantly changing.” It’s weird for her think she would never return to the Palisades — “so we’re not saying that,” she says, “but it’s hard to know what the Palisades is going to be, and how long that’s going to take. Right now, we’re trying to take it day by day.”

As she awaits news about her kids’ school, she’s received an outpouring of support from friends. She’s also resumed filming. “I have been going back to work and playing a first responder, which is so crazy to be doing that in my work life, and then coming back to those same circumstances in my real life,” says Hewitt of 9-1-1, the eighth season of which premiered on ABC March 6. In addition to giving her a newfound respect for first responders — “they really are heroes” — the role also taught her to heed caution.

“I did wonder a few days into all of this, if playing a first responder on the show was part of the reason that I listened to my gut that day and made moves faster,” she says. “Even though I play a fake person, we talk about real things on the show. I was like, ‘I wonder if being Maddie on 9-1-1 made me pay just a little extra attention that day to what I was seeing around me, and the difference of that day versus other days where you’ve seen fire warnings or flames. Because there was such a difference that day in me, personally — and how I handled it, and how seriously I took it from the beginning. And so, I do wonder if my job maybe helped me a little bit that day — just knowing more about the inner workings of first responders and what they pay attention to.”

She’ll also be revisiting her character Julie James from the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise in a new reboot, out this summer — “I did that movie for the first time when I was 18 years old!” she remarks. “Never say you can’t go back.” And her experience with grief inspired two other recent projects: The Holiday Junkie (Dec. 2024), a Lifetime film about a woman facing her first Christmas without her mother, which marked her directorial debut; and her non-fiction book, Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Grief, Joy, Celebrating, and Making Every Day Magical (BenBella Books, Dec. 2024).

“I grew up with a magical mom who had a magical mindset and taught me to try to create that in my daily life, but also for those around me,” she says. “The Holiday Junkie movie — I’d always wanted to be in a Christmas movie, and it never really came to me before now. I got to be in it with my husband, and my kids were in it, and I got to direct it, and it was really a love letter from me to the holidays and magic-making, but also to my mom.” Hewitt hopes to do more directing and Christmas movies in the future.

Her book also recounts her journey through grief — and her love of the holidays — through memories, photographs and family recipes.

“When [my mother] passed, I remember thinking I had lost all the magic I had ever known — because she was that for me,” Hewitt says. “And in wanting to write the book, it was a day in my house where I realized I had inherited that magic. I was a new mom, I had a little girl and I was in grief, and I needed to not sit in that. It’s sort of back to where I am now with the ‘Love Angeles’ thing — it’s an interesting parallel where I was in pain, but I needed to do something active. So I figured out how to create magic for my family and in that, really drew my mom’s memory very close to me on a daily basis and was able to get through grief with actually creating joy.”

Hewitt’s learned, both then and now, that dwelling on what’s lost is not proactive. “Moving through that and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel — and the love and the small miracles that can be found in tragedy — is the thing that allows you to move forward,” she says.

“It doesn’t mean that you don’t cry, it doesn’t mean that you don’t feel it, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t aware every single second of all that’s changed and been taken away; it just means you know that there’s a forward momentum to finding light again.”

Source: LA Magazine