After four years on Chicago Fire, Miranda Rae Mayo still gets scared. Not of the flames that often surround her, but of the work itself.
“This season has been one of the hardest for me,” she admitted recently. “Every season at the start of every season, there’s this fear where I think to myself, ‘Can I still do this? Am I still good?’”
Mayo must be doing something right. She’s been portraying firefighter Stella Kidd for half the life of the series.
She relishes the opportunity to be playing a woman who’s in a still somewhat non-traditional role. “I do feel a certain sense of responsibility. This role, in that respect, carries a lot of pressure,” says Mayo. “But, what I really try to focus on is that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude that I get to do this.”
Mayo says that even though she continues to grow a little more comfortable in her role each season, she still looks at the scripts sometimes and thinks, ‘holy crap’ about what she’s going to be doing. But, she sees this as a welcome challenge. “I think it’s really cool to stretch myself emotionally and physically, and in this job I get to do both.”
One of her character’s responsibilities is driving the fire truck, which Mayo actually does. “I was a wreck the first time I actually did it,” she explains. “And I still get really nervous because we’re going down real streets, and a lot of the time there are camera people on top of the truck or on the side of the truck filming.”
But, Mayo says that some of her personal tension has been eased by the fact that she learned her big rig driving skills from professionals. “I was trained by real fire safety officers to do this, and they’re the best of the best, so that helps me relax just a little.”
On this day, she’s in warm, sunny Southern California, while her co-workers are in Chicago, where they’re experiencing their first snowfall of the season. “Outdoor production doesn’t stop because of the weather, ever,” says Mayo. She laughs when she says that some of her fellow actors gave her a hard time about leaving them for the gentler climate, even if it was just for a few days.
Those co-workers are numerous as all three Chicago shows – Med, Fire and P.D – interact within one world. As such, Mayo works not only with the core actors on her show, but with others in the Chicago universe.
But, there are some that she hasn’t had as much screen time with as she’d like. “I would love to work with [Charge Nurse] Maggie from Med (Marlyne Barrett), and [Detective] Upton from P.D. (Tracy Spiridakos), but I really want to get into a triangle of some sort with [Firefighter] Mouch (Chirstian Stolte) and his wife Sergeant Platt, mostly because I really want to work more with Amy Morton [who plays Platt].”
Mayo lists icons Barbra Streisand, Morgan Freeman and Jane Fonda as inspirations, but the people she really looks up to are stage actors, “I love Broadway,” she says. “Those people are crazy talented,” as she mentions, among others, Dear Evan Hansen’s Ben Platt and The Color Purple’s Cynthia Erivo.
She’s hoping to corral some of her fellow Chicago thespians to join her on a trip to New York to see an upcoming show.
For now, she’s concentrating on where her character is headed this season. “I totally want to know what’s ahead because then I can craft beforehand what I need to,” she says about Kidd’s season long arc.
Another part of Mayo’s mission going forward is to get more viewers to check out her show. “You know, every single person that I’ve talked to who has, like, accidentally caught a glimpse of the show says that once you’re in, you’re in. It’s like a big action movie every week and there just really aren’t a lot of shows like that. So turn on your big TV and watch us. It’ll fire you up!”
She immediately laughs as she realizes her unintentional pun. “Ahh, I mean that in a good way!”
