‘9-1-1’: Kenneth Choi Loves That Chimney ‘Solved His Own Emergency,’ Plus What’s Next With Maddie?

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So he won’t say “never again” if he’s offered interim captain like he did earlier this season?

Exactly. Let’s hope so because I personally think he would be a great captain. His problem has always been that he has a lot of self-doubt. One of the pieces that we addressed in this episode is the death of his friend Kevin, [and with] his relationship with his father, I think that’s been a big piece of the puzzle as well. [Recently] he sort of found a semi-resolution with his father. So I think those two big puzzle pieces being discovered, he can now move forward. So as far as being interim captain, I think that he’d accept the challenge more willingly, absolutely.

Speaking of his relationship with his dad, is it the best it can ever be at this point?

I think that it’s at a good place right now for Chim. I have tremendous hope for Chimney and his dad. I personally experienced a similar issue with my own father. I wanted to be an actor since I was 10, and being a very traditional Korean family, very much like Chimney, my father didn’t accept that as a serious career choice. So I literally dropped out of college and I literally ran away from home for five years to become an actor because acting wasn’t something my father would allow him to do.

They have such a knack for writing our characters in a way that parallels our lives. Oliver Stark and I have joked since Season 1 that they bug our trailers and our homes. Meredith, I swear to God, Oliver and I will be talking about something in the trailer and the next day it’s in the script.

My relationship with my own father very much parallels Chim’s with his father. We eventually worked it out, so I have high hopes for Chimney and his dad that the relationship can get even better, especially now that he’s a father. I don’t have children, but a lot of my friends who have children say once you have your own children, you can understand the plights of your own parents. So I think that they have further to go.

Speaking of being a father, we got that sweet scene near the end with Chimney joining Maddie and singing to their daughter.

It was lovely. Part of it is it’s lovely just to watch Jennifer Love Hewitt. I love working with her. She has her own children and she’s one of the best moms I’ve ever seen, so she transfers that energy to our TV daughter, who is the most adorable baby, I think, in TV history, our little baby Jee-Yun. But watching Jennifer sing, watching her interact with the baby, there’s a thing that I do with Jennifer, she’s just so real and emotionally available that it makes my job so easy. I literally just learn my lines, show up on set, and all I do is look at her and react. So for that first part where I enter the scene, I’m literally just watching Jennifer as Kenny watching her interact with this beautiful child and she kind of does all the heavy lifting for me. I literally just bounce off of her energy.

There is always the question of whether Chimney and Maddie might get married. Where is his head at the rest of the season when it comes to that possibility?

I’d love to just see Chimney and Maddie have some genuinely happy times. They’ve suffered so much trauma in their relationships, in their personal lives. In the next episode, there is this sort of inciting incident that happens that forces their hand to make some decisions that they have not spent enough time thinking about, meditating about. I am hoping that they make the right ones.

Jack Zeman/ FOX

When Buck (Stark) was struck by lightning, he’d gone up the ladder instead of Chimney. If Chimney had, what would his coma dream world have looked like? One where Kevin lived? Something else?

I think Kevin would definitely be in there. If you see the story arc with Buck when he’s dead, it goes through all of his traumas, so I think it would be similar in the sense that perhaps his family life would be idyllic very much like Buck’s was with his parents and Kevin would absolutely be a huge part of it. I’m wondering if there would be a little Tatiana [Rachel Breitag] nod in there. You remember Tatiana?

Yes, and I remember how that ended.

[Laughs] So she might have reared her head in Chimney’s fever dream.

And he would’ve turned to Hen (Aisha Hinds) first, right?

100 percent. Hen is his best friend and his partner, in life and in work — I shouldn’t have said that because Maddie would probably be jealous of that,

I don’t think there’s any partnership on 9-1-1 that’s as “ride or die” for each other as Chimney and Hen.

I believe so, too. Yeah, they’ve been there since the beginning. They were there before everybody. Chimney was there when Hen arrived. I love seeing how their relationship evolves.

9-1-1, Mondays, 8/7c, Fox