Morena Baccarin has done her crimefighting homework.
The actress stars in CBS’s new “Fire Country” spinoff “Sheriff Country” as Sheriff Mickey Fox. The procedural follows Mickey as she heads up her small hometown police force while grappling with her daughter’s battle with addiction.
“It’s been so fun to understand law enforcement, to train in that way,” Baccarin tells me on Zoom video during a lunch break on the Ontario, Canada set. “We always have somebody on set with us, helping us with things like if I’m suspecting somebody’s going to come at me and they’re potentially armed and I’m walking out of my car and I’m parking, how do I do it? Do I pull my gun out?”
Removing her gun from a holster takes a lot of practice. “Matt Lauria [he co-stars as deputy Nathan Boone] and I joke around a lot because half of our time on set is spent practicing pulling the gun out, putting it back in, pulling it out and putting it back in,” Baccarin says. “You want it to be second nature because when you put that gun back in you don’t want to look down to see where it is.”
Not that Baccarin will ever get completely comfortable handling a firearm. “I’ve aways been very scared of guns. I don’t own a gun. I believe if we didn’t have guns at all, then a lot of the stuff that we deal with would not be happening,” she says. “But I have a new respect for it. Everybody who has been teaching us has been incredibly respectful about 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 be cast 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 kids, in New York. “I 100% thought the job was going away once I said that,” she says, adding, “I think that was a big moment for me to realize that I am valuable enough for them to make that concession. It also sets up a really nice work relationship, not just that they want me, but that we are partners in this.”
Baccarin reflects on being a working mom in Hollywood. “You’re definitely letting somebody down sometimes, at all times, whenever,” she says. “You come to work without having done enough work at home. You miss a birthday, so you make up for something by having a day off and doing more than you should. It’s a mess. But I try to remind them that even if we’re not together, I’m thinking of 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 superhero world. Her voicework for animated projects is prolific, but her most prominent role is that of Vanessa Carlysle in the “Deadpool” movies. “It’s been such a long journey. I can’t it’s almost 10 years since we shot the first one,” she says. “I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams that that’s what it would have turned out to be. We had so much fun shooting it. It was such a fun world. I hope that I get to do more of it and participate a little bit more than the last one [“Deadpool & Wolverine”]. But I understood that it was the bro comedy.”
Her superhero resume expands with her role as The Sorceress in the upcoming live-action “Masters of the Universe” opposite Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man.
She says of Galitzine’s muscled-up transformation for the role, “It’s insane. 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 a no-brainer 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 get-up and the wig and contacts and all of it. I’m so excited to see what they make of it because I feel like my part of it was just such a small element to what it’s going to actually be in the end.”