Chicago Fire interview: EP Derek Haas teases big Herrmann story, Sarah Shahi’s return

On Thursday night’s new episode of Chicago Fire there are a number of different things to be excited about. For one, you’re getting a huge story for Boden that could propel him towards the end of the season. Beyond that, Sarah Shahi will be returning for the first time in a few years as Renee Royce and David Eigenberg has one of his best stories on the series in quite some time as Herrmann finds himself in a very emotional and vulnerable spot. We don’t want to say too much more about that other than that you’re going to want to watch it live.

So what goes into deciding to give an actor like Eigenberg a big story at this time, and what can we expect from Casey and Boden? In the first part of our two-part interview with showrunner Derek Haas, he dished on a few different things.

CarterMatt – David gets some incredible material within this episode when it comes to Colan Nino that really gives him a chance to run the gamut. When you give a character a story like this what’s the collaboration like?

Derek Haas – It starts with the writers, and a lot of times in the second half of the season we look at the characters and say ‘who hasn’t been serviced enough this year?’ and we had this rich storyline for Yuri [Sardarov] going for four episodes and Joe [Minoso] was a part of that storyline. We just thought ‘we haven’t given David much beyond comic relief for the past six or seven episodes. What could we do?’ That’s where it starts.

A lot of times when I’m on set, I’ll tell the actor what’s coming or I’ll call them. I called David and I remember when I sent that script in the next day I got an email from [Christian] Stolte — a lot of times when you deal with actors, you get an email saying ‘thank you for a great scene.’ Instead, Stolte said ‘man, you wrote a killer episode for David.’ I thought that was really sweet for Christian to point out — he was so excited that David was going to get to play this part. That was great.

What went into the decision to bring back Sarah Shahi for these episodes? What made this the right time?

I don’t want to say it was purely happenstance — we’ve been thinking about it for a while — but I got a call from our casting director Jonathan Strauss. He keeps his ear to the ground on if any actors behind our past characters suddenly become available and just floats you the option, saying something like ‘oh, did you know Treat Williams has this window?’. A lot of times, we’ll be too far down the road in the storyline to respond to something like that, but Jonathan called us a couple of months ahead of time saying that Sarah Shahi was available and she loved her time on the show. I went straight to the writers’ room, because we had already mapped out our final four episodes, and said that we had a chance to bring Renee back, something that we’d been talking about for two years, and that she was available on these dates. We could have her in the last three episodes and really drive this Kidd – Severide story. We were going down a road anyway and this could really form that road.

Can you set up what’s going to happen for Boden in this episode?

What happens is that Boden, earlier in the season, had been told that he was going to be in the running for a promotion [replacing Grissom], and then Grissom came to him and said ‘listen, I want to keep doing what I’ve been doing, I’ve been reinvigorated.’ In this past episode, Boden took a step back and said ‘you know, I’ve been waiting around for promotions to happen. That’s the way that I’ve been brought up. I don’t seek things out, but as it turns out I kind of wanted it.’

So, when we find out the commissioner is going to be leaving to go work for FEMA, Casey has the idea of ‘you know what? It’s a big jump, but it’s not unprecedented. Why not put Boden’s name in the hat?’

Related – Check out even more news regarding Thursday night’s new episode!

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