9-1-1: Nashville fans have been hoping to see LeAnn Rimes‘ character Dixie find love — but could the country singer’s real-life husband, Eddie Cibrian, fill in that role?
During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly about the hit ABC series, Rimes, 43, showed support for Dixie getting a love interest, saying, “We just did a crossover episode with a couple of the guys on 9-1-1 and Dixie doesn’t fall short of a little flirtation in that episode. So there is a little of that going on. I do think she needs a love interest at some point because she needs some distraction.”
Rimes didn’t rule out Cibrian, 52, coming on board to help make that story line happen.
“They’ve definitely talked about it because he’s on set with me a lot,” she noted. “Sometimes they just say that we should be putting him to work. Who knows? He could come on and play my love interest all day long. I would have no problem with that.”
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The couple, who have been married since 2011, are in a great place as they continue to balance their personal and professional lives.
“It’s very calm, which is so nice. My stepsons are 22 and 18 and they’re still living at home. I don’t think they’ll ever move out of our house,” Rimes quipped. “Everybody is great and everything is so quiet. We both are very calm people and we just enjoying very normal stuff. Then we leave our little nest to go do these things that are our jobs and then we come back and do normal things.”
Rimes gushed about this chapter in their lives, adding, “For me especially, everything has been go, go, go, my whole life. So to be able to settle into something that feels normal and calm was unnerving for a while. Because my nervous system doesn’t know what to do with calm. But I’ve started to train it enough that now it’s just like, ‘Oh, this is a breath of fresh air.’”
As Rimes remains booked and busy, her biggest sources of success continue to be her music and her return to acting. 9-1-1: Nashville gave Rimes a chance to push herself as an actress.
“I’ve never been a regular on a series. It was juggling all the things of life along with touring and then something that I don’t do normally. It’s not second nature to me. Every time I walked on set, I was learning, and it was great having Eddie with me sometimes, because I’m like, ‘Explain to me, what are they talking about? What are these words that I’ve never heard before because I haven’t been on set in forever?’” she told Us. “Every episode was something new. I would get the scripts, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, my God, can I pull this off? Then you just dive in and do it. I’ve learned a lot from the show.”
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Rimes also got to incorporate her skills as a musician with her new song, “Wild Things Run,” which she created for the show.
“I’ve been living this song for a while, but it actually happened very fast. TV moves quickly, so I got the script, but the very, very rough draft of the montage of the song was going to be put behind on the show,” she recalled about the song that was featured in the midseason return. “From that moment to releasing it now has only been a few weeks time. In the grand scheme of things, I live with songs for months before it gets released. So, it feels great. I’m so happy it’s out in the world. I’m so happy people get to see the episode with the song in it. It was great to be able to create something for Dixie.”
Rimes referred to the experience as a “bit stressful,” adding, “It keeps you on your toes. I feel like Don (Chris O’Donnell) and Dixie’s relationship has been these two wild souls running towards each other and then away from each other. Then the universe always is bringing them back together. So we wrote it kind of from that perspective.”
She added: “It is also a song that Dixie gets discovered by. So it has to feel like a hit song, which usually when I write, I don’t think about that. … It was a great way to stretch my brain as a writer. Actually, it has given me some interesting thoughts about how to go about writing a new record from this perspective, and I love the way that the song is so cinematic. It sparked something in me for moving forward into writing my next record. It’s a good moment in time that’s just sparking a lot of things in me.”
9-1-1: Nashville airs on ABC Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET before streaming the next day on Hulu.
