Fans have been eagerly awaiting the return of CBS’ hit show Fire Country, since its explosive season 2 finale. Last Friday, October 18, the third season premiered, ready to answer some burning questions.
We got the chance to talk to Billy Burke, who plays Vince Leone on the show, all about the upcoming season.
Nerds and Beyond: Now that Bode is a free man, how do you see his and Vince’s relationship evolving this season?
Billy Burke: Well, I hope that it’s not easy. It’s not super smooth, but you start to get little glimpses of what it might have looked like had he never gone away and gone to prison.
Nerds and Beyond: I love the relationship between Vince and Sharon. What’s one of your favorite things about their relationship and working with Diane [Farr]?
Billy: Well, we’ve gotten really lucky from the get-go. We’d never met before we started doing this show, and I just feel like we got really lucky just with that combination of whatever it is that works so well. She’s really good at what she does, and I think that what she and I do together compliments each other real well. When it comes to the stuff that’s outside the emergency and incident stuff, the bulk of my family, as it were, is with her and it seems to be an unbreakable, infallible relationship that they have, which is pretty rare to see in real life, but even on television.
Nerds and Beyond: When I talked to Tia [Napolitano], she talked about how you have firefighter consultants. What kind of advice, if any, did they give you about playing a firefighter?
Billy: Jeff and Simon, lovely guys. We have two guys who are on set with us, and they sort of trade episodes back and forth, and they’re awesome. Mostly what they do is… I talk to them both all the time, because there are things when you know when we’re doing a certain procedure… everything’s dramatized. So you got to sort of fit the reality into the dramatization. So little tweaks and things like that, mostly, but when I talk to Jeff and Simon, we’re just laughing about sh*t. This is now my third or fourth firefighter gig. I’m not going to say that I could go out and professionally fight a fire, but I feel like I have a pretty good grip on what procedure is. I can’t speak for the rest of the cast, but with me, there’s never a lot of hard direction. It’s just, “Instead of that, just do this.”
Nerds and Beyond: What is one of your favorite characteristics of Vince’s?
Billy: Probably the most honorable or noble characteristics of Vince’s that I probably personally might struggle with, are the ones… he’s got that sort of innate, undying protector guy in him, which I didn’t grow up with and now have only really developed as a father. My daughter’s 16 years old now, and that’s been a real learning experience in terms of what that really means. I was the baby in the family. I had two older sisters, so I was kind of the one being protected. So, I consider that Vince’s biggest and best quality. And if he does it in stupid ways sometimes, he really does mean well in trying to look out for everybody in the community and everybody in his family.
Nerds and Beyond: Is there an actor on the show that maybe you haven’t worked with as much that you’d like to?
Billy: That’s a good question. I would have to say, like most of the bulk of the work that I do on the show, when it comes to scenes that aren’t incidents, the bulk of those are with Diane. I’m doing the Vince and Sharon stuff, which is great, and it’s some of my favorite stuff to do. But I would have to say, everybody. I would love to have more scenes with all the other characters. I think the relationship between, I said this earlier on, the relationship between Vince and Manny, there’s a lot of places to go because they’re two struggling fathers. The relationship, obviously, between Vince and Jake, because he’s sort of a surrogate son, and the relationship between Vince and Eve because she’s sort of a surrogate daughter. And now Vince and Gabriela have some stuff this season because although she’s got her own father, he’s still got that protective instinct with her as well. Then, of course, I’d love to have now that he’s back out of prison, more scenes with Bode.
Nerds and Beyond: Last question — if you had one word to describe this upcoming season, what would you pick?
Billy: Surreal.
Fire Country airs Friday nights on CBS. You can catch up on episodes and watch them the next day on Paramount+!
