FIRE COUNTRY: Max Thieriot Shares Insight Into Directing Morena Baccarin’s Debut

Max Thieriot steps behind the camera on the Friday, April 12 episode of FIRE COUNTRY, as an inmate escapes from Three Rock—and a deputy sheriff Mickey (Morena Baccarin), who has an unexpected tie to the Leone family, is brought in to investigate.

Though “Alert the Sheriff” is technically a regular episode of FIRE COUNTRY, the character of Mickey could be spun off into her own show. This means Thieriot had the difficult task of introducing a new character and world into the show, while also keeping things true to what fans have loved for almost 30 episodes.

“The important thing, bringing in a new character into the show, and especially one that shows such a different side of the world than we’re used to seeing, is that it feels FIRE COUNTRY—but still can kind of be unique in its own way,” Thieriot tells Give Me My Remote. “And I think this character, and this episode specifically—just because we do see a lot of the sheriff’s office work and it’s not all firefighting stuff—it was important, obviously, that it looks similar but had a little bit of its own flavor. So what we did was we sort of colored the episode a little bit different.” 

“We still use a lot of the same lenses—[we] use some longer lenses in certain areas like the sheriff’s office and kind of gave it…more earthy tones,” he continues. “But you never want to have like any episode in the season stand out and [viewers] go, ‘Whoa, why does this look so different or weird’ or whatever. Because obviously the goal is to be able to watch every episode in a row and feel like you’re watching a ten-hour movie this season. But it still felt important because we were showing a different part of Edgewater. We were seeing people do different jobs that we don’t normally see. We wanted it to be the same but unique…That was kind of the goal.”

Given Mickey isn’t exactly new to the world—even though she’s new to viewers—”we really wanted a character that felt she was part of the community,” Thieriot says. “Everybody knew her. She’d been there and fit in with the rest of the show. And I think that was one thing that Morena really honestly accomplished so well. She came right in, was such a pro—I can’t say enough about how wonderful she is as a person, and as an actress, also, to work with—[and the character] felt lived in; she felt like a character that was real and existed in the world. She obviously brought a lot to it, but she felt like she fit, and fit with these people, and these characters and this town. That was something that you never know how it’s gonna go—and she really sort of aced it.”

On a normal day, Thieriot is in a unique position on the series, playing the lead Bode, as well as serving as co-creator of the CBS drama. In this hour, in addition to serving as director, he also has story by credit alongside FIRE COUNTRY co-creators Tony Phelan and Joan Rater. But even though he was there for Baccarin, both literally and figuratively, as she joined the FIRE COUNTRY world, Thieriot acknowledges he “didn’t really have to give her much guidance.”

“I think that we probably surprised her a little bit with how fast we shoot,” he says. “We do a lot and in a short period of time. We’re always running and gunning, and I think she was a little bit shocked at first how quickly we move. But because she is such a pro and it was pretty wordy for her—she had a lot of lines in this episode—she came in and she was prepared. She had sat down with my writing partners, Tony and Joan, talked a little bit about the backstory that we’ve come up with for this character and [that] gave her some somewhere to start. So she wasn’t coming in only saying this stuff on the page—she had a real sense of who this character was that led up to all these moments.”

“[That conversation revealed a] lot of those things that we never even see in the episode, but really is the foundation for who Mickey is,” he continues. “She really grasped onto that and was able to lean into those things.”

The actor-writer-director also leaned on his own experiences to help inform production. “I brought a sheriff buddy up from NorCal,” he shares. “He was there throughout the episode, so that was really, really helpful, as well, just to have somebody there who does this job…for 20-something years and can sit there and say, ‘This is how I would do this thing. This is how I would handle it. This is how we speak with people in the community and how we do things differently from other law enforcement.’”

“A big thing, too, is when you work for the sheriff’s office and you’re out on patrol, it’s not like you’re in Los Angeles where if you call for backup, [and] another car is going to be there in a minute,” he continues. “You could be working 45 minutes, an hour, from another deputy. So you really have to handle every situation much differently. And you gotta have a lot of friends out there, because it could be some citizen that’s helping you out one day in a bad situation. It’s life or death, really.”

Speaking of life and death—though the series is going big for Mickey’s introduction, the characters will still be reeling from the tragic death of Cara (Sabina Gadecki), the mother of Bode’s maybe-daughter, Gen…and Jake’s (Jordan Calloway) almost-fiancee. 

“A lot of that [grief] resonates with Jake in this episode,” Thieriot previews. “We get that a little bit of time has passed, but everybody’s sort of still reeling…we touch on Cara’s death, and just how everyone is dealing with it differently. It’s a lot of pressure that’s all of a sudden been put on this whole community and how they’re going to deal with this young girl and who’s going to be there? Bode’s still incarcerated. Who’s going to be there to really step up? How is Jake going to step up when he’s going through the loss that he’s gone through? Can you bury that? Can he put a smile on his face and be there for her when she needs him?”

“It’s tough,” he continues. “But we [episodes] shoot in order and everybody was really affected, not just in the show, but outside of the show, about losing Cara and Sabina. And so I think it was definitely still really fresh on everybody’s minds and [we] try and just play [with that] as much as we can throughout the episode.”

FIRE COUNTRY, Fridays, 9/8c, CBS

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