Morena Baccarin has done her crime-fighting homework.
The actress will star as Sheriff Mickey Foxx in CBS’ new “Fire Country” spinoff, “Sheriff Country.” The procedural follows Mickey as he leads a small local police force while dealing with his daughter’s battle with addiction.
“It was a lot of fun understanding law enforcement and training like that,” Baccarin said in a Zoom video during a lunch break on set in Ontario, Canada. “I always have someone with me on set to help me with things like, “If I’m thinking someone is coming towards me and they might be armed and I’m getting out of my car and parking, what should I do? Should I pull out my gun?”
Removing a gun from a holster takes a lot of practice. “Matt Lauria[co-starring Nathan Boone in the supporting role]and I often joke that half our time on set is spent practicing pulling guns, putting them back, drawing them, and putting them back,” Baccarin says. “When you put the gun back in, you don’t want to look down to see where it is, so you want it to be natural.”
Baccarin never fully mastered firearms. “I was so scared of guns. I don’t own a gun, and I don’t think a lot of the things we’re dealing with would have happened if there weren’t any guns at all,” she says. “But I have a newfound respect for this weapon. Everyone who taught us had an incredible respect for this weapon and when you use it, when you touch it, what you do with it, and how you treat it.”
Baccarin said she was convinced she wouldn’t be cast in the show when she told producers she would only sign on if production moved from the West Coast to the East Coast, because she wanted to be closer to her family, her husband Ben McKenzie and their three children in New York. “I 100% thought that if I said that, the job would be gone,” she says, adding, “I think that was the big moment where I realized I was valuable enough to make concessions to them. We also developed a really great working relationship where not only did they need me, but we were partners in this space.”
Baccarin reflects on her position as a working mom in Hollywood. “Sometimes, all the time, you’re definitely letting someone down,” she says. “They come to work without doing enough work at home. They miss a birthday, so they take a day off and make up for it by doing more than they should. It’s a mess. But I try to remind them that even if I’m not with them, I’m thinking about them, that they’re a part of me, that doing what they love makes me a better mom, and that someday they’ll understand that.”
Baccarin is a familiar face in the superhero world. Although her voice work in animated projects is numerous, her most notable role is that of Vanessa Carlyle in the film Deadpool. “It’s been a very long journey. It’s crazy that it’s almost 10 years since I shot my first film,” she says. “I never dreamed it would turn out like this. It was a lot of fun to shoot. It was a fun world to be in. I hope to be in it more and be a little more involved than I was in the last movie (‘Deadpool & Wolverine’). But I understood that this is a sibling comedy.”
Her superhero career expands with her role as a sorceress in the upcoming live-action film Masters of the Universe, starring Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man.
She said of Galitzine’s muscular transformation for the role: “It’s unbelievable. I saw him on set and he’d been training for months and months. I was like, ‘Oh my god, how did they do that?'”
Participating in this film was a no-brainer for Baccarin. “My brother and I grew up watching ‘He-Man,’ so that was a really big part of my childhood,” she says with a smile. “When I got there and saw the costume and what they had thought of for me, the whole costume, the wig, the contacts and everything else, it was really amazing. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they think of it, because I think my role is just a small element to what it’s really going to be in the end.”
