Ghost Whisperer co-stars and real-life lovebirds
Jennifer Love Hewitt (Melinda) and
Jamie Kennedy (Eli) didn’t let go of each other’s hands as they roamed the halls of Comic-Con in San Diego over the weekend. I managed to get a few minutes with them, as well as their co-stars,
Camryn Manheim (Delia) and
Christoph Sanders (Ned) and producers Ian Sander and P.K. Simonds to spill secrets about their new season, premiering Sept. 25.
Love, Jaime, you two are obviously inseparable. Does that mean we’ll see more Melinda/Eli scenes this season?Love Hewitt: Hopefully, yeah. I think they’re going to come up with fun stuff for us to do. We got to do a fun scene the other day that was funny and heartfelt. Eli and Melinda are sort of partners in crime and they share their weird gifts.
Camryn, Ned, how does the show’s five-year jump effect your characters?Manheim: My son is dating girls and sucking face and I’m not super happy about that.
Sanders: I’m in college studying the paranormal. Eli is teaching one of my classes. It’s great to finally play my own age. Ned was 16, and now he’s 21 like me.
Manheim: Delia has rented the store next to Same As It Never Was, and has started her real estate business. She’s also dating several men.
Jamie, we’re going to meet some of Eli’s family this season?Kennedy: Yeah. My dad, Ray, is being played by Barry Newman.
Love Hewitt: We have Barry Bostwick in the same episode playing his dad’s friend and business partner, Don. And we have the amazing Christine Estabrook (
Desperate Housewives’ Martha Huber) playing Eli’s mother, Evelyn.
What is Eli’s relationship like with his parents?Love Hewitt: Not normal.
Kennedy: My dad and I have a strange relationship. My mother and I have a good relationship. The episode I’m filming now is crazy. The bomb’s keep getting dropped. It’s something that’s either going to work or people are going to think this is really weird. It’s something that’s not addressed normally in television.
Love Hewitt: Not everyone on the show has to necessarily be alive.
Simonds: We realized because of Eli’s comic relationship with the dead, it might be fun to bring characters on who might give us eyeballs on the other side. This season there’s going to be some storytelling that involves things that ghosts can see that we can’t.
What powers does Melinda’s 5-year-old son, Aidan, possess?Sander: He’s a special child. He has the gifts that he has and much more. He can see things she can’t, and sense things she can’t. What that lets us do is reveal a new dimension we haven’t seen before. There are beings on this other plane who are wonderful, magical forces of good. And some are the direct opposite. There’s a new enemy that we’ve never grappled with before. Also, sometimes there are things that don’t want to be seen. Shadows perhaps.