All season, there have been some smaller crossovers between Fire Country and its spinoff, Sheriff Country, and on Friday, April 3, the shows team up for a thrilling, fun, two-hour event that’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from Edgewater.
When a bus full of teens goes missing, Sharon (Diane Farr) and Mickey (Morena Baccarin) lead the investigation from their respective angles — the search for them and who’s behind it — while also dealing with some more tension, the result of the former’s mom Ruby (Christine Lahti) showing up. Meanwhile, Bode (Max Thieriot) and Boone (Matt Lauria) are the ones who must work together to save the teens’ lives. TV Insider spoke with Thieriot and Lauria about just that. Warning: Spoilers for the Sheriff Country and Fire Country crossover ahead!
“Me and the ex-con?” It’s impossible for Boone to imagine the two of them being friends, and he repeatedly reminds Bode of his past throughout these two episodes. But when they end up in the same container as the missing teens, trapped underground in the quarry, and Boone is dealing with his claustrophobia, it turns out the two make a great team. They are able to work together and with Station 42 and Three Rock above ground to control the use of the explosives around the container to make digging them out easier — and Boone even crawls his way out through a tunnel and the dirt as part of that — to rescue the teens. After, Bode and Boone grab beers and play some pool.
As for who’s behind the kidnapping, it’s actually Sharon’s mom, Ruby, who helps Mickey out there. It goes back to families who had been displaced from their homes when developers bought up the land and wanted the money they felt they should have gotten back then from the ransom. Ruby was briefly on the county board of supervisors back then, and so she remembered all the names, helping her stepdaughter Mickey identify those involved.
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But at the start of the crossover, Sharon isn’t happy when Ruby stops by while she’s at Mickey’s. Sharon refuses to talk to her mom, even ready to cut Mickey out again for wanting the two to repair their relationship. But when Sharon steps on a landmine at the quarry near the container, Ruby hurries to the scene and does what’s asked and stays back as Sharon’s stepfather (Mickey’s father), Wes (W. Earl Brown), disarms it. Ruby then turns to Wes for advice on how he fixed his relationship with his daughter, and he says to let Sharon come to her. By the end of the crossover, Ruby and Wes are dancing together, and Sharon and Mickey are back on track. As Mickey explains, it’s been good to have her dad back in her life, and she wanted the same for her sister. Sharon’s still not sure about Ruby, however.
Below, Max Thieriot and Matt Lauria discuss their characters’ new bond and filming the crossover.
If you’d asked Boone who he’d want to be trapped in a small space with before all this, I feel like Bode wouldn’t have even made the list. But it also feels like Bode is what Boone needed, right?
Matt Lauria: I’ll take a minute to brag on Max because he’s kind of the actor or the dude that if this was a real situation, you would want Max to be the guy that you’re stuck with, and that’s true for Bode certainly. And so that begins to be undeniable, especially when Boone is having to confront his very real limitations and shortcomings. Nobody wants their soft underbelly to be exposed in that way in front of another law enforcement dude, in front of these kids who are under your care. But I think that’s the real journey of having to — I mean, I have this scene in the car with Mickey where she’s like, “You guys buddies now?” And I’m like, “Yeah, me and the ex-con?” I just have so many reasons to not trust this guy and not want to spend time in a box with him, but then it’s undeniable.
How was it filming those scenes for both of you?
Max Thieriot: Honestly, it was cool. I think the sets that we built were super impressive, and the tunnel to get out, Matt really, really dug in there.
Lauria: It was like a six-minute take of sweating. But it was also, we shot so fast. I mean, because of the limited amount of time with — We were filming simultaneously, so we had to finish our stuff in Toronto and then fly the Sheriff Country cast out to finish the stuff that we had in Vancouver. And that day we must have shot, I mean, I think we shot all those sequences in six hours or something like that in that box, it’s a breakneck pace. And the crew out there are so impressive. They were so fast with handheld cameras and moving the walls around. But yeah, we were speeding.
Thieriot: Yeah, very run and gun, for sure. We have limited time to do a lot of the stuff that we try and do. But honestly, Matt’s a pro. And when you have people like Matt who show up and just nail their stuff and are able to do the work at a high level, you’re able to get stuff like that done.
Eric Milner/CBS
Lauria: Thanks, boss. I mean, it just did not … Oh, I’ve got a funny story. I was on the plane, and we had so little time to do everything that we had to do. And I won’t bore you with the details. We just didn’t have a ton of time with the material. And I’m on the flight, and I’m sitting next to some lady who’s a big fan of Fire Country, and she had just started watching Sheriff Country, and I’m hiding [the scripts]. She’s like, “So what are you looking at?” I’m like, “Nothing.” And she’s like, “What is it? ” And I go, “It’s nothing.” And then she’s like, “Do you need help running lines?” And I was like, “No, no, that’s so sweet. Thank you. Thank you. ” And then 10 minutes later, I was like, “Honestly, it would really save my butt. Can you promise me that I can trust you?” And so we ran lines on the flight, some lady, and she was wonderful. She was so sweet, but she loved Fire Country, so she was really excited. Oh, the point of that story is I desperately didn’t want to disappoint the boss, Max. So I was like, oh boy, here we go.
That’s sweet. It feels like Bode also has a newfound respect and appreciation for who Boone is after that experience.
Thieriot: For sure. And I think not only is Boone a sheriff — and Bode, I think, has mixed feelings about law enforcement at this point in his life — but Boone’s also a bit of an outsider from the town, and so this is a really tight-knit community. I think there’s an added level of uncertainty for Bode, like, ‘how much can I trust this guy?’ I think that Bode knows if he needs to call Mickey or tell Mickey something, he might be able to. But yeah, there’s definitely a lot of uncertainty for Bode about who this guy is. But obviously, as we get through the episode, their relationship and their trust really start to develop, and we have a lot of fun doing it.
Matt, you brought up the scene with Mickey in the car and Mickey wanting them to be friends, but it feels like by the end, these two might be friends. I know because of where you each film, it’s hard to do crossovers, but might we hear on one or both shows about these two actually hanging out?
Lauria: I think they would, man. I think they’re going to have beers. I think they’re going to go out and grab nachos. I think these guys are like … I mean, we’ve gone through something. That is such a high-stakes situation, and there’s this brothers-in-arms effect that I think evolves out of that. And so I think it’s brothers. I think it’s brothers for life. You go through something like that, and we’ve got to get Max out to film some Sheriff Country.
Thieriot: That’s right.
Lauria: Are you going to come here?
Thieriot: Yeah. Listen, I’ll be there in June.
Lauria: Heck, yeah.
Max, how early on in the process of talking about the crossover did you know you wanted to bring in Ruby to have her help with the case? The Ruby and Wes scenes were so good. And you’re starting the early steps of fixing Sharon and Ruby’s relationship, which it seems will carry into Fire Country?
Thieriot: I think we felt like it only seemed natural that, especially considering her history with Wes, that we got to see … We love to explore the messy family dynamics. And certainly Mickey has spent time around Ruby, and I think it felt like a great opportunity to get to see a little bit of that messiness unfold and get to see where she and Wes currently stand and what that relationship may have looked like at some point. She and Earl are, I mean, both just fantastic in general, but I think the two of them are a lot of fun together on camera as well. So those scenes turned out really great.
And it’s going to be easier on Bode if Sharon and Ruby can get along.
Thieriot: For sure, for sure. But nothing’s ever easy on Bode, I don’t think. It’s always got to be hard.
What were each of your favorite scenes to film in this crossover?
Thieriot: I had a lot of fun, even though it was pouring rain that day, doing the softball scene. I think just because so many of us were together, anytime you get to film with everybody, for me, it ends up being fun. I know it’s a little bit more of a headache for the crew and the ADs to be wrangling everybody at one time, but that stuff was a lot of fun. I think also the stuff at the quarry, the stuff at the quarry was fun. Exterior quarry stuff was pretty rad.
Lauria: Yeah, that was a blast when the bombs were going off. And when Bode strikes, is discovering the buried container and hits something hard, and then we’re just digging. And because the cameras were so far back and there were so many cameras rolling, they were making sure that everything was working, and we’re in the elements, it’s late at night, and it was wet out. And so we’re digging in the sand, Max and I are digging in the sand, just digging, and we’re like, still digging. And we must have just dug and dug for 10 minutes straight, of just playing in the sandbox. There was so much about this episode that felt really real in terms of the elements. You can’t really tell, but it was a torrential downpour for the entire softball game. So yeah, we’re all out in it, so it felt like a real game. And so much of this, when we’re stuck in that box, it really was like being stuck in a confined space for a long time with a bunch of people. So it was really fun to be tested in those situations.