Max Thieriot Talks Challenge of Starring in 'Fire Country' and 'Seal Team' (Exclusive)
Max Thieriot is about to be all over Paramount. Along with starring in the Paramount+ show SEAL Team, the 33-year-old actor will also star in the CBS series Fire Country, which premieres on Friday at 9 p.m. ET. In an exclusive interview with PopCulture.com, Thieriot talked about balancing both shows.
"It's a lot. It's not easy," Thieriot exclusively told PopCulture. "I know my wife looked at me like I was a little bit crazy when I told her I was going to do both. She's like, 'Okay. So we have no break this year.' But thankfully, what kind of worked out was that because SEAL Team is on Paramount+ now, their shooting schedule is different. Right? So it's not in the same cycle as the network cycle. And we started thankfully really right after I finished filming the pilot of Fire Country and I got to shoot SEAL Team during that sort of break while we were waiting to hear if we got a series order and then waiting to start the series in July. So I got to kind of wedge it right into that block. So I got lucky, honestly. I think a lot of folks were like, 'This is never going to work out.' But we fit it in there."
Season 6 of SEAL Team premiered on Paramount+ last month, and Thieriot plays Clay Spenser who recently got into a bad accident where he lost his leg. Clay is currently rehabbing, and his injury comes as he told Jason (David Boreanaz) that he was leaving the team. Thieriot has been on SEAL Team since the show launched on CBS in 2017.
Fire Country tells the story of Bode (Thieriot) who is a young convict hoping to redeem himself by joining a prison release firefighting program in Northern California. But when he gets assigned wot his hometown where he has to work with former friends, things heat up in a big way.
With Thieriot playing a firefighter and Navy SEAL, the physicality of both shows can be challenging for him. "SEAL Team was extremely physical for me and I changed my physicality for that show to prepare for it," he said. "And so I've tried to maintain that into this show as well, just so that my body and my conditioning never becomes a detriment to the job that I'm doing so I can purely focus on the acting. And so if I'm in the best physical shape that I can be in, then I can purely work on the mental side of the job. And so for me, it's constant training. It's not easy on this show because I'm an EP and I'm involved in so many different facets of the show. I'm certainly busy 24/7. So it's finding that hour a day to get into the gym and get that work in. But for me, it's all part of it, right? It's all part of the job."