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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Fire Country Season 2 Episode 5 “This Storm Will Pass.”]
For Jake (Jordan Calloway), the latest Fire Country does start with something that makes us laugh: He spills about Genevieve possibly being Bode’s (Max Thieriot) daughter to Vince (Billy Burke), Sharon (Diane Farr), and Gabriela (Stephanie Arcila)—a.k.a. Bode’s father, mother, and ex-girlfriend—because he needs someone to know as a fire tornado rages around them.
But then it all takes a turn, when it becomes clear that Jake’s girlfriend Cara (Sabina Gadecki)—he was thinking of proposing!—is dying of injuries sustained in the ambulance crash at the end of the previous episode. All Jake can do is say goodbye to her over the radio (“I was a different person before we fell in love. … I was going to tell you thank you for loving me. I love you. I will always love you.”).
Below, Calloway opens up about that tough goodbye as well as what’s ahead as Jake grieves and his relationship with Bode.
How is Jake going to be coping with Cara’s death going forward?
Jordan Calloway: He’s going through it. Can we start a GoFundMe for Jake and his mental status? Because this guy, y’all drag him through the mud. First, he loses his girl to his best friend. Then he gets accused of arson, and then this. Oh my goodness, what’s next? Don’t give me a dog and then take the dog away. That’s all I’m going to say. Don’t do that. [Laughs] It’s been fun, honestly, playing Jake in this period of his life, playing Jake, who’s found love. He’s loved. He’s able to love. He’s been able to experience love, the guy that wasn’t even sure if he was ready to get married in Season 1 or if he had found love. So I love love and seeing Jake experience that as well as seeing Jake lose that, it’s like the old adage, ‘Better to have loved and lost than to not,’ right?
So I think in the maturation of Jake, also in the roles as a captain, a father, and potentially a husband, I think all of this loss, all of these things that he’s experiencing is only going to make him better because he’s seeing himself through it. Now, if we got real dark and he didn’t, then, well, that’s just a sad tragedy. But I think with where he’s headed to now, and the trajectory at which he’s focused, being Genevieve, I think that is his North star. That’s his beacon of life. That’s also his new hope—Star Wars reference—that takes him on this journey, his now hero’s journey of his own self-identity, a new self-identity that he’s going to learn where he is not dependent on Cara, who was there to teach him how to open up, teach him how to confide in someone, and also confidence.
Sergei Bachlakov/CBS
This new role of being a captain was not one that came with ease. We have seen it numerous times throughout the seasons where he gets wisdom from either Manny [Kevin Alejandro], Vince, or Sharon, and you see a chink in his armor where it’s like, can he do it? And then when you see this metamorphosis of where Jake gets to in that role as a captain and finding that confidence and stepping and standing more in that confidence and not feeling as if it was a job that was just given to him because of the surrounding incidents with Three Rock, with Sharon running away, with Bode being back in prison and seeing that as like, no, I can actually do this. And then you also now have that juxtaposed with him stepping into the role of being a father. Those two—I think even being a father alone in that relationship with Genevieve is what makes him an all-around better person, better captain, better friend. And he even calls friends out. It’s been a pleasure playing Jake this season with where he’s at in his life because it’s been one of redemption, his own redemptive story after loss.
He’s watching over Genevieve now, but there’s the Bode of it. Jake and Bode’s relationship is so complicated and so good because of that, and they seem to be in a good place. How is that going forward, considering Genevieve?
It wouldn’t be drama if we didn’t have drama. I love Max. Max is great, first of all. But the relationship between Jake and Bode, there’s some stuff that’s been going—and then can we also just note that Cole [Tye White] is not helping, by the way? I’m friends with Tye, but Cole is not helping the situation by, “Yeah, that should be you and that family. Oh, look at..” Come on, brother. Can I get some help? I’m just trying to keep the peace. [Laughs] It’s been a fun season seeing how Bode and Jake have sort of bumped heads and clashed. Jake’s a captain of all sorts. He wants to pull the best out of his team. We saw that with the relationship between him and Eve [Jules Latimer].
Another great relationship.
I love it, right? That’s little sis. And so when you look at Jake and you look at the conversations, he kind of is that surrogate older father out of the whole new generation, and he stepped into it. It’s that thing that he’s been trudging his way and finding because he didn’t know what he really wanted throughout life. He was playing sports, he was chasing girls, but then he found firefighting, and that’s what he’s found his groove in. But in firefighting, he’s become a leader, and in leadership, you can point out the strengths and weaknesses of your fellow people that are with you, that you’re in charge of, the ones that you’re leading. So that being the case, he wants to pull that out of Gabriela, out of Bode, out of Eve, hell out of Sharon and Manny, all of ’em. And so you see that in that relationship [with Bode]. I think it might be the next episode where some stuff really comes to a head between Bode and Jake, and yeah, Bode needs to be brought down a little bit.
When Cara was dying, Jake basically proposed over the radio, which was heartbreaking. Talk about filming that.
Yeah, so at that time, Tia [Napolitano] was on maternity leave, and Bill Harper had stepped in as interim showrunner. David Gould had written that episode. We had a couple of conversations with Bill Harper as well as David, and I told him and conveyed some of the things that I felt needed to be there. Part of that was he needed to say goodbye to Cara since it wasn’t scripted anywhere else for him to say goodbye. We went through a couple of rewrites and drafts, and we eventually landed on what you guys saw, so hearing that means so much, knowing that it landed well with the audience.
How it boiled down for me playing Jake is Jake is a seasoned veteran firefighter. He knows that this is an open-wave radio. He has his battalion chief right next to him. He had to have his emotions in check. He has to have them in check, regardless, just being on the job. But now you put into the fact that he can’t see the love of his life and say goodbye to her. He only hears the beep beep over the airwaves, and as well as the fact that they’ve been going since the day prior, and they’re mentally, physically, emotionally fatigued. All of those factors playing in, now, something’s wrong with Cara. What do you mean? I’m hearing over the radio waves, all I can do is rush to get there. That [beeeep] hits, you don’t know what to do. I’m mentally fatigued, I’m emotionally drained, physically beat up, but I have to have some sort of control of my emotions because the biggest thing is I’m a captain and there’s an open radio wave where everyone can hear me.
And so I think there was a period where it was written where he has an emotional break. I was like, we can’t do that. But it’s taking all of that stuff and making sure that it is pushed down. That’s where we get our best drama, that you feel that. It was fun being able to play the opposite of a radio, essentially, but that’s what we do. And for me, it really boiled down to, okay, how does Jake feel about not being able to say goodbye to his love? It just came down to that.
Is that emotional break coming? Can it come for him? Because he has to think of Gen and about being captain too.
Season 1, you got that emotional break. I don’t know if we show that. I think what we’re experiencing more so throughout the rest of the season for Jake’s journey is his recovery and him handling everything that has recently been thrown upon him—not just the death of Cara, but him wanting to be and stepping up into being Genevieve’s father because this is the only thing that he has left of Cara, and so he wants to be a father figure for her. But as he said in the episode prior, “I’ll always be Uncle Jake.” So I think for Jake, that’s the journey that he is going on, is showing the process of his recovery. Whether he has a big emotional break, I haven’t seen it yet, but stay tuned.
There’s always Season 3…
Season 3’s coming. There’s so much to play with. I just love the fact that Cara was his real love. So I don’t want to muddy that up by finding somebody else and getting into another—I would love to have a whole season where he’s just pouring into this little girl everything that he can, and who knows, play with a new love interest and the humor of my little surrogate white daughter and how she may feel about whoever I’m going to bring home.
Fire Country, Fridays, 9/8c, CBS