Morena Baccarin has done her homework when it comes to fighting crime.
The actress stars in the new CBS “Fire Country” spinoff “Sheriff Country” as Sheriff Mickey Fox. The procedural follows Mickey as she leads her small hometown’s police force while battling her daughter’s battle with addiction.
“It’s been so much fun understanding law enforcement, training that way,” Baccarin tells me over a Zoom video during a lunch break on set in Ontario, Canada. “We always have someone on set with us who helps us in certain situations, like if I suspect someone is going to attack me and they’re potentially armed and I get out of my car and I park, what do I do? Should I take out my gun?”
Removing your gun from a holster takes a lot of practice. “Matt Lauria [he co-stars as deputy Nathan Boone] “I joke a lot because half our time on set is spent taking the gun out, putting it back in, taking it out and putting it back in,” Baccarin says. “You want it to be second nature because when you hand over that gun, you don’t want to look down to see where it is.”
Not that Baccarin would ever be completely comfortable with a gun. “I’ve always been very afraid of guns. I don’t own any. I believe if we didn’t have guns at all, a lot of the things we face wouldn’t happen,” she says. “But I have a newfound respect for it. Everyone who taught us was incredibly respectful of the weapon and when you use it, when you touch it, what you do with it and how to handle it.”
Baccarin says she was sure she wouldn’t go on the show when she told producers she would only sign on if production moved from its planned West Coast location to the East Coast because she wanted to be closer to her family, husband Ben McKenzie and their three children, in New York. “I 100 percent thought the job was going to go away once I said that,” she says, adding, “I think it was a big moment for me to realize that I was valuable enough for them to make that concession. It also established a really nice working relationship, not only that they want me, but that we’re partners in this whole thing.”
Baccarin reflects on being a working mom in Hollywood. “You definitely let someone down sometimes, any time, any time,” she says. “You come to work without having done enough work at home. You miss a birthday, so you make up for it by taking a day off and doing more than you should. It’s a mess. But I try to remind them that even though we’re not together, I’m thinking about them, that they’re a part of me, and that it makes me a better mom if I can do what I love, and that one day they’ll understand that.”
Baccarin is a familiar face in the world of superheroes. Her voice work for animated projects is prolific, but her most prominent role is as Vanessa Carlysle in the “Deadpool” films. “It’s been such a long journey. I can’t, it’s been almost 10 years since we filmed the first one,” she says. “I never imagined in my wildest dreams that this would have happened. We had so much fun shooting it. It was such a fun world. I hope I get to do more and participate a little more than the last one. [“Deadpool & Wolverine”]. But I understood that it was a comedy between brothers.
Her superhero resume grows with her role as The Witch in the upcoming live-action “Masters of the Universe” alongside Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man.
She says of Galitzine’s muscular transformation for the role: “It’s crazy. I saw him on set and he’d been training for months and months and months, I was like, ‘Oh, my god, how did you do that?'”
Joining the film was obvious for Baccarin. “I grew up watching He-Man, my brother and I, so it was a really big part of my childhood,” she says, smiling. “It was really cool once I got there and saw the costume and what they had in mind for me – the whole outfit, the wig, the contacts and all that. I’m so excited to see what they do with it because I feel like my part was such a small part of what it’s going to be like in the end.”
