Yahoo Lifestyle 'Fire Country' Star Max Thieriot Talks Bode's Major Milestone and Sending Off Jared Padalecki
Episode 7 of Fire Country Season 3, “False Alarm,” contains a milestone event for Bode Leone (Max Thieriot): The former inmate becomes an official member of Cal Fire. He graduates from the training program for formerly incarcerated people and is hired to work alongside his family and friends at Station 42.
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But it wasn’t easy for him to get there. He almost didn’t make it, because his commanding instructor Camden Casey (guest star Jared Padalecki) felt he was too distracted by personal entanglements to be sufficiently focused on firefighting, and wasn’t going to graduate him because of it. But in the end, Bode wins him over, thanks in no small part to his bravery and selflessness during a high-pressure rescue, achieving the goal he’s been pursuing since the start of the show.
Thieriot, the show’s co-creator and executive producer as well as its star, says, when you’re making a show like Fire Country, you never know how many seasons you’ll get, so it’s important to keep the story moving along when you have things you want to do but haven’t done yet.
“I think this to everybody felt like the right spot,” he tells Parade in an exclusive interview. “And we believe we have a lot of really good stuff to mine from here going forward.”
Related: Everything to Know About Fire Country Season 3
Bode becoming a full-fledged firefighter creates a lot of new opportunities for both story and action sequences (known to the Fire Country producers as "incidents"). Thieriot says trying to keep Bode involved in incidents when there were so many places he couldn’t be was one of the show’s most challenging problems.
“And now that he's at 42, we feel like the sky's the limit,” he says. And even day-to-day life opens up new possibilities for Bode. “It's the conversations that he has with all these people around him. It's the time outside of the firehouse. It's going to Smokey’s and all these places that we just kind of couldn't really bring him to naturally. We're super excited about that. Obviously, the graduation is sort of the jump-off point.”
Here are some of the biggest talking points from Season 3, Episode 7 of Fire Country.
What’s next for Camden Casey?
“False Alarm” concludes Padalecki’s three-episode arc on Fire Country as Bode’s hard-charging instructor. Thieriot and Padalecki are good friends in real life, and Thieriot is happy they finally got to work together. The episodes have a lot of action, even by Fire Country standards, and Padalecki came into what could have been a difficult situation and exceeded the cast and crew’s expectations.
“Obviously, he’s been doing it for a long time,” Thieriot says of Padalecki, who starred as Sam Winchester on Supernatural for 15 seasons. “But it’s different when you come into a situation or a show that's going as a guest and everybody has these expectations. He and I are family, but [the Fire Country team] isn’t his family, right? That's how a lot of sets can feel and become. And to be able to step into that and just boom, he walks in on set, does this giant action sequence, knocks it out of the park.”
When Padalecki was cast, CBS also revealed that a potential spinoff about Camden Casey was in early development. “At this point, there’s no news to share on spinoff stuff. We’re super focused right now on launching Sheriff Country,” Thieriot says about the spinoff about Morena Baccarin’s Mickey Fox that’s slated to premiere next year. “We have so much work to do over there, in a good way. But I love Jared, and I think we all loved having him on the show and we love his character. So you never know what lies ahead. But in the meantime, it was a positive experience for us and we’ll see what happens.”
Related: Jared Padalecki Makes His Hotly-Anticipated Fire Country Debut
Are Bode and Audrey going to be a thing?
Episode 7 also contains some notable developments in Bode’s romantic story. He and Gabriela (Stephanie Arcila) are officially in an "off-again" phase of their relationship, and he’s getting closer to Audrey James (Leven Rambin), his fellow inmate-turned-cadet-turned-Station 42 firefighter. Her long-distance boyfriend just broke up with her, and Bode gets flirty, cooking her a celebratory steak dinner and telling her how good she looks. Something is obviously brewing between them. But in the meantime, Leven Rambin is bringing a different, welcome energy to Fire Country.
“Audrey has been such a fun character for the show,” Thieriot says. “She adds such a different presence in the fire station and in Bode’s life. For someone who’s had a hard time fitting in a lot of places, it really feels like she fits in. I think the fun thing is that she and Bode have lived so many of the same life experiences that most people don’t go through. And their ability to relate to one another and really see each other is unique and special. I think that’s why they’re starting to have this relationship that’s whatever it is.” They’ve become friends, and Thieriot hints that Episodes 8 and 9 will start to really get into if there’s something more to it than that.
“I think that Leven is super talented," he continues, praising his new co-star. "She’s an actress that’s capable of really sort of doing anything. She just has that natural, very grounded and real thing about her that’s hard to do. That realness on camera and just honest performance makes working with her a lot of fun.”
Related: Diane Farr Reveals She Lost Her Voice Due to Anxiety While Directing Fire Country
What’s going to happen with Gabriela and Jake?
Gabriela, meanwhile, is spiraling out of control. She’s doing dangerous cliff dives, pushing herself too hard at work, and drinking a lot. On one of those drunken nights, she hooks up with her ex, Jake (Jordan Calloway). He's going through a rough patch of his own, as his legal ward Genevieve wants to stay with her biological family. How will Bode react when he finds out what happened between his not-girlfriend and his best friend inside of Jake’s truck?
“There’s gonna be a lot of emotions that get stirred up with that, not just between Bode and Gabriela, but Bode and Jake,” Thieriot says. “Obviously the reveal of that is shocking enough. But I think getting to see how that plays out is going to be eating away at these characters and eating away at the audience, just waiting for it to drop.”
Fire Country’s midseason finale airs Friday, Dec. 13 at 9/8c on CBS. The series streams on Paramount+.
