The CBS drama star talks directing her first episode, what’s next for Smokey’s, and learning how to love from Sharon.
Diane Farr is an actress, a writer, an entrepreneur, and a mother, and now she can add “director” to the list. Farr, who plays Division Chief Sharon Leone on CBS’ firefighter drama Fire Country, made her directorial debut on the third episode of the show’s third season, “Welcome to the Cult,” joining co-creator Max Thieriot and Kevin Alejandro as actors who have made the jump to directing on the series. At first, though, she was hesitant to take her seat in the director’s chair.
“I was like, ‘No, I’m too old. I don’t want to learn any new things. I just want to do the thing I know how to do,’” she tells Parade with a laugh in an exclusive interview. But she agreed to do it, and trained in preparation. As the episode approached, she wasn’t surprised to be nervous, but she was surprised at how nervous she felt.
“Not sleeping for three days, didn’t really eat, was living on coffee,” she says. And when she got to set for the first day of filming, she lost her voice. “It wasn’t my throat, but my stomach went out, there was no push in my voice. And thank God it was Kevin Alejandro and Jules Latimer only in the first scene. And if they noticed, they pretended not to, which I really appreciate in them. I think the fear of disappointing 200 people at the same time really, really got me. But then I had fun.” She got her voice back by the second scene.
Overall, she thinks she did a good job. When she didn’t see many changes in the final product from what she turned in to the producers, she took it to mean the higher-ups liked her work. “I’ll never take a compliment for real. I always wonder, ‘Why are you saying that?’ But when the show came back, and it looked super similar to the show that I handed in, I thought, ‘Oh, they left it the way I saw it. I did what I was supposed to.’ That was the best compliment to me.”
She says that the eight days of prep and eight days on set she spent directing gave her a much better understanding of the process of making a TV show as a whole. “All actors should go through director’s prep. Because we decide things on the day like, ‘Hey, I don’t want to do this,’ and we’re unaware that 40 meetings have happened because of this,” she says. “Three different departments had to get together over that toothbrush in your hand to decide the color, the make, the speed.”
A change of location for a game-changing chat
Farr was pleasantly surprised to find how much being a writer helped her as a director, more so than it would have if she only had experience as an actor, because it gave her a more holistic sense of the best way to tell a story. “As an actor, I want to worry about character. As a writer, I want to worry about the arc,” she says. “And as a director, it’s like, how do I make it pop? How do I make it look as interesting as I possibly can?”
An example of how she understands how to tell a story in the most interesting way comes in the final scene of the episode, where Gabriela (Stephanie Arcila) tells Bode (Thieriot) that they’re bad for each other and shouldn’t be together. That conversation comes immediately after their meeting with Jake (Jordan Calloway) and Gilmore, the firefighter they almost killed while rescuing, where Bode and Gabriela confess their sin of covering up what they did to Gil and are forgiven for it, enabling Bode to stay in the cadet program.
The scene was originally written to take place fully inside Gabriela’s car parked on the side of the highway. But Farr changed it so that it takes place on a quiet road in the woods and starts with Bode hanging out of the car window while it’s moving, enjoying his freedom. She wanted to emphasize that in that moment, Bode is as happy as he’s ever been, which makes the emotional drop at the end of the scene hit even harder. “I ended up pulling money out of other scenes to make that one happen, because I understood that the highest high I can give him will show the lowest low,” she says. “If I can make him very thrilled at the beginning of the scene, it would make the ending more poignant.”
What’s next for Sharon?
In a little bit of art imitating life, Farr’s character Sharon’s arc this season is about getting out of her comfort zone. She and her husband Vince (Billy Burke) are embarking on a new adventure, buying and repairing Smokey’s, Edgewater’s watering hole that was nearly destroyed in the season premiere. She’s excited for fans to see what happens at the new-look Smokey’s, and hints that Vince talking about rebuilding the stage where bands used to play will pay off in a big way.
“The thing I’m the most excited about is the singing,” she says. “There are so many people in this cast, myself not included, who are amazing musicians, and they’re all coming.”
Vince was initially hesitant to take on the difficult, expensive project Smokey’s will be, but he came around when he realized how much it means to Sharon. It’s further evidence that Sharon and Vince are one of the best, most loving and secure marriages on TV. And a big part of that is that they still desire each other, even after all these years.
“We try to find a way to physically get to each other in every single scene, so that we understand that their bond is not that they’re mommies and daddies,” Farr says. “The husband and wife archetype is so unsexual, right? Like, there’s a boyfriend and girlfriend who can become husband and wife, and from one archetype to the other, you lose the whole sexuality. We keep trying to make them a physical, tactile couple, so we remember why they’re together.”
Farr, who is divorced, says performing such a happy marriage has been good for her own life. “I’m far more respectful of my TV husband than I was in my own marriage,” she says with a laugh. The way Sharon doesn’t immediately start telling Vince how she thinks he should fix his problems, but just listens to him and touches him and gives him the space to find the solution on his own, has been instructive to her. “I’ve learned from this character how to be a better partner in real life,” she says. “Like we just watch each other, and the witnessing is its own form of love.”