Max Thieriot Admits His SEAL Team Co-Star Inspired His Exit from CBS’s SEAL Team drama Clay (played by Max Thieriot) isn’t exactly a surprise, as fans already knew the actor was headlining one of the network’s biggest new series. That project, Fire Country, proved to be a huge hit with audiences and ultimately meant that Thieriot couldn’t lead both of those action dramas. In a new interview with James Corden on The Late Late Show, Thieriot went into detail about how he got the series off the ground.
Not only does Thieriot star in Fire Country, but he also co-created and produced the hit CBS firefighting drama.
And that was the first thing Corden wanted to ask the SEAL Team star as he opened their interview on Wednesday’s episode: “Congratulations! This is a hit, people are going crazy about this movie.
“What inspired you to come up with this idea and create, produce and star in this hit movie?”
Thieriot took a breath before revealing that it was his former SEAL Team colleague AJ Buckley who planted the seeds for Fire Country.
“At first, I thought I was losing my mind, it was crazy, it was so many things,” Thieriot began with a chuckle.
“But actually I was — one day, I was driving to work with my friend AJ Buckley from SEAL Team.
“And we were sitting there talking back and forth about firefighting.
“I grew up in a small town in Northern California and a lot of my friends… the community was a really good community for firefighting, and a lot of my friends worked for the department.
“It was all so natural to me because I had been there and I had seen it and I started telling him about it and he said, ‘Dude, this is a show.’ “And I was like, ‘What do you think? ’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’” Then I started telling people… when I started talking about the inmate firefighter program, a few years ago, it was unheard of.
“People were like, ‘You mean there are inmates fighting fires? Right next to regular firefighters?’ I was like, ‘Yeah!’ “(So) I started building the world and a lot of the inspiration came from this crazy little town where I grew up and the people I grew up with, you know.”
“And so I took pictures of my friends from Facebook, from their wives’ Facebook pages because these guys didn’t even have Facebook.
“I just took their pictures and put them together into a cool video, put them together into a big document and sent it back and forth to my agents and was like, ‘Is this enough?’” (And they were like, ‘Give us a little more.’ So I (said), ‘How about this?’ ‘No, that’s too much,’ and so this whole process happened and yeah, here we are.
So it was Buckley, who plays Sonny Quinn on SEAL Team, who pushed Thieriot to get Fire Country going.
Buckley remains a Bravo fixture on SEAL Team, which is currently awaiting a seventh season green light on Paramount+.
Thieriot was joined on the Late Late Show couch by Black Adam star Noah Centineo, who detailed his own experience with firefighters.
The actor accidentally started a bathroom fire when a candle burned out of control.
