Jennifer Love Hewitt once planked for five minutes. She tells me this while holding the position for three minutes. We’re at Gloveworx, the Los Angeles boxing gym where she works out six days a week. Leyon—Hewitt’s go-to instructor, the sculpted sweetheart of a man who owns the place—wants to see us engaging our core. My face is dripping, my hips are drooping, and my body is shaking like a metal ruler that’s been whacked across a palm. Hewitt, meanwhile, is cracking jokes. “9-1-1, what is your emergency?” she says.
This is my emergency. This I didn’t prepare for. When I arrived just before 8:00 a.m., Hewitt popped out of the waiting area in glittery pink high-tops, with a handshake and a cold bottle of water. “You ready?” she’d asked. Sure. I didn’t think we’d break much of a sweat.
I figured we’d discuss Hewitt’s return to television on Ryan Murphy’s 9-1-1 while making leisurely jabs at a punching bag. Maybe we’d chat about her days on Ghost Whisperer and The Client List over a green juice. Then as we walked back to the car, maybe I’d pepper in a few nostalgic questions about Party of Five, the show that launched Hewitt’s career and introduced fans to the cathartic power of BoDeans’ “Closer to Free.”
Instead, by 8:01, we’re jogging the width of the gym, back and forth, back and forth, as part of an exhaustive warm-up that includes lunges, squats, more squats, more squats, and three minutes on the Mount Everest of “total body cardio equipment” called the VersaClimber. “Welcome to the death machine,” Hewitt says. She has one in her garage.
But the real challenge comes next, in the ring, where we take turns going up against Leyon’s hand pads. I keep forgetting to keep my gloves up and tripping over the footwork, while Hewitt moves with skill and determination, jabbing and ducking like Dolph Lundgren. She breaks form only briefly, once to hop around to Cardi B’s “I Do,” and once to laugh at an inside joke with Leyon, who’s become a loyal friend. He calls her “JLH” and has taken to posting screenshots of 9-1-1 to his Instagram Stories. She owns a pair of leggings with his face on them.
“You can’t replace Connie Britton,” says ‘9-1-1’ showrunner Tim Minear. “What you need is someone who is irreplaceable themselves.” Hewitt, he says, was it.
A few rounds in, Hewitt flashes me a concerned look and asks if I need to hydrate. “Here,” says Leyon, instructing me to tilt my head back and open wide so he can pour the water in. “There’s your Rocky moment.”
“It was fun, right?” Hewitt asks after our hour is up, nodding in response to her own question. If she’d knocked out my front teeth, I’d probably still have walked around smiling for the rest of the day. When we reconvene for lunch a few hours later, I’m still high on endorphins, and Hewitt tells me why the boxing gym became her second home: “I didn’t start because I was going back on TV.
I’m not working out to look good on a magazine cover. I’m not doing it to compete with people—I’m just doing it because I’m in love with it.” Hewitt suggested we go boxing, it turns out, because it represents a new chapter in her life—one in which she’s prioritizing herself over the expectations of others.