Yahoo Lifestyle 'Fire Country' Star Kevin Alejandro Talks Pulling Double Duty in a 'Raw' Midseason Premiere (Exclusive)
Kevin Alejandro directs Fire Country’s Season 3 midseason premiere, which also happens to be an important episode for his character, Manny Perez. Manny’s relationship with his daughter Gabriela (Stephanie Arcila) has been strained to near its breaking point since he got convicted of assault and sent back to Three Rock, the inmate fire camp he used to run as a Cal Fire firefighter. Gabriela resents him for not being there for her when she needed him, physically and emotionally, after her wedding fell apart. But after a cathartic confrontation in an abandoned campsite bathroom during a wildfire, they’re both on the road to recovery.
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Alejandro tells Parade playing this sadder, angrier version of Manny in Season 3 has affected him. “It does hurt me whenever Manny is hurt," he says. “Because Kevin’s feeling that hurt, too, because it’s coming from me.” He’s been playing Manny with a heaviness this season. His shoulders are slumped, and his tone of voice is tighter. But that’s going to change after this.
“You’ll see towards the end of the season that he stands up a little bit more. He’s got a little bit more grace to him,” Alejandro says. “But right now, it was a conscious effort to make his body and his physicality sort of crumble in a little bit in the way he holds himself.”
Read on to find out what Kevin Alejandro had to say about pulling double duty on the Fire Country midseason premiere.
Related: Everything to Know About Fire Country Season 3
Stephanie Arcila "knocked it out of the park"
“Coming in Hot” takes place during a blaze that has engulfed the woods around Edgewater, including the Edwards family ranch, which Eve (Jules Latimer) is leading the fight to save. At the end of the previous episode, Gabriela stormed off the job after a fight with Jake (Jordan Calloway) and ended up trapped in the burning woods. Manny went to find her, which means he escaped from prison. When he caught up to her, she was in a bad way, injured and exhausted and confused. They took shelter in the bathroom, where Gabriela unloaded all of her pain on her father, and he listened, taking it all in.
Alejandro says this episode, and that scene in particular, was very special to film because he and Arcila got to prepare for it more than usual because she was shadowing him as a director. “So she was by my side the whole time,” he says. “As we're breaking down the script, breaking down the scenes, she would have questions or ideas she would throw to me. The whole process was a great rehearsal that we don't often get in our business.”
TV actors usually prepare on their own, rehearse a very little bit, and then quickly shoot the scene. But in this case, they got more time to plan. “By the time we were on set, it was like we didn't even think about it,” he says. “And it made for really a beautiful sort of experience, because, at that point, we understood what the scene was at such a depth that the moment she spoke, I knew my job was just to listen. I thought that we handled it really well. Stephanie had an elite level of emotion, and an A-class level of—I hate to call it performance, because it didn't feel like performance. It just felt raw. I thought that she knocked it out of the park.”
Using never-before-seen shots
Alejandro says the episode has some types of shots in it that haven’t been on Fire Country before, most notably the transition where the camera pushes in on a fire truck headlight and pulls out on Manny’s headlamp. He credits the show’s director of photography, Stewart Whelan, for being down to experiment with shots like that. “He is just so collaborative and so cool that, if I come up with an idea, I know when he likes it, and he'll add his thing and make it even cooler.”
Alejandro says that Whelan gave him a wonderful compliment about this episode. “Stewart was like, ‘Hey, I just gotta let you know that this episode has challenged me and given me so much more creative freedom than I've had in a long time. And thank you,’” he says. “I was like, ‘Well, thank you, bro, for being willing to go on the journey.’” Alejandro feels “lucky” to get the credit as the director, but he couldn’t do it without his crew’s help. “I almost feel like a fraud when I take the credit, because it wasn't just me,” he says.
Related: Five Burning Questions About What’s to Come in the Second Half of Fire Country Season 3
Directing is collaborating
“Coming in Hot” picks up from the cliffhanger ending the winter finale “Promise Me” left off on, with Bode (Max Thieriot) and Audrey (Leven Rambin) trapped in a swimming pool as everything around them burns. Alejandro says that as the director of a cliffhanger resolution, it’s important to coordinate with the director of the first part to make sure things are set where they need to be.
“The first director gets to make all the calls, right? Gets to choose the sets, gets to do all that, and I pick up. That’s the collaborative part of it,” he says. During production of Episode 8, Alejandro went to that episode’s director, Eagle Egilsson, and told him his plan for how Episode 9 would start, and asked him to leave Bode and Audrey’s walkies here, their jackets and boots there, and have them facing in this direction so he could pick up with his shot. “If another director ends on a cliffhanger and you pick up, it’s very important to communicate with that director and share your ideas of how you’re going to open,” he says.
Fire Country is returning amidst the ongoing recovery from the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles, where many of the show’s cast and crew members live, including him. Alejandro was not personally affected, but he knows many people who were. “We're lucky to have amazing heroes out here trying to contain these fires and trying to point everyone to resources where they can help, and we have nothing but respect for them,” he says.
Fire Country Season 3 airs Fridays at 9/8c on CBS and is available to stream on Paramount+.
