‘Fire Country’ Star Max Thieriot Teases Directing ‘Coolest Practical Stunt’ for Two-Hour Season 3 Finale (Exclusive)

Fire Country’s going big for its Season 3 finale, and Max Thieriot spoke to PopCulture.com about what it was like directing it.

In “A Change in the Wind,” airing on Friday at 9 p.m. ET on CBS, “When a fire erupts at a gas station, Bode and Manny jump into action to protect the patrons and property.”

In the second episode, “I’d Do It Again,” airing at 10 p.m. ET, “Extremely high winds and dangerous conditions push the Zebel Ridge fire into Edgewater, threatening Three Rock and Walter’s care facility.” Thieriot told PopCulture that the “upcoming finale is definitely big.” He continued, “In fact, the second hour, I feel like all we did was shoot nights in action. So it was heavy. But I don’t know. I’m honestly excited to be doing a two-hour finale.”

“We haven’t done it yet. We haven’t done a big episode like this with this much length and time to it,” he explained. “And I think the fun thing about that is you never find that there’s any sort of rush point in the episode or where you feel like you have to progress things more than you want to because you get to let it sort of all develop over a larger time period.”

The SEAL Team alum not only stars on the CBS drama and is the co-creator and executive producer, but he also directed the first hour of the two-hour finale. He shared it was “equally challenging and equally big. We had a lot of real, practical fire again, which I love to do. It’s a lot of movement, a lot of stunts with pretty epic stunts. I told everybody after the day we finished filming, I said, I’m pretty sure I just shot the biggest, and I know I’m biased, but coolest practical stunt that we’ve done on the show. We’ve done a lot of visual effects.”

“We did a sequence that was pretty epic with no visual effects in it, which was a little nerve-wracking,” Thieriot continued. “You go into doing it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, that doesn’t work. I’m gonna have all of my eggs,’ and everybody’s gonna be looking at me like, ‘Max, why’d you waste all this money?’ But we thought I’d take the first take, and it was like one of the situations where somehow everything came together, the cameras were all pointing at the right place at the right time, and it all happened, and it works better than I’d hoped.”

Even though Thieriot has directed in the past, this is different since it’s technically the season finale. The actor said he likes “doing that sort of penultimate, which this year is obviously part of the finale as opposed to being the one before, because I like the action. I like the stunt stuff. I like the big, high-concept sequences that we sort of build and put together. And so I always kinda try and get myself into that episode before the finale because that’s usually where that happens, and usually in the finale, you have so many storylines you’re trying to wrap up. But this one was different, certainly.”

“So far, each one has had something about it that was big and a little daunting,” he shared. “The episode I did in Season 2, it was the stuff we did with the helicopter and burning this cabin, and that was all done practically. A lot of it is always about convincing everybody else of your plan. You come with this plan. You just come and do it. ‘Don’t freak out. These are real helicopters.’ Like, ‘What do you mean real helicopters?’ I’m like, ‘Well, you know, the ones that fly in the air, and you can actually ride in real helicopters like that.’ But I don’t know. Directing is something that I feel really confident in doing.”

Fire Country is known for going big, and it sounds like there will be a lot to look forward to in these final two episodes of Season 3. And with Max Thieriot directing the first hour of the finale, there’s going to be much more to look out for. Fire Country has been renewed for Season 4, so it wouldn’t be surprising if there was yet another cliffhanger to keep fans on edge. Tune in to the season finale beginning at 9 p.m. ET on CBS on Friday.