Max Thieriot Shares How He Stays Fit and Healthy To Prepare For His Explosive Return In Fire Country Season 3.
For Max Thieriot, one of the creators and the star of the CBS series “Fire Country,” all roads lead back to his roots.
He was raised on a vineyard off the coast of Sonoma in Northern California. And for a while, he lived nearby on 90 acres of his own with his wife and two sons.
But “Fire Country” — about prison inmates joining elite firefighters to battle the region’s blazes in exchange for shorter sentences — shoots near Vancouver, British Columbia. So Thieriot, 35, moved his family to rural Washington, where his kids could continue to run around with the chickens and the goats.
“I wanted to try and keep the same lifestyle for my wife and my boys, and not to totally upend their world,” he said.
Alas, Thieriot still has wine in his blood.
About 14 years ago, he and a couple of childhood friends started their own vineyard. The big lesson?
“It’s much faster to do, and makes a lot more sense, when you have an entire crew,” he admitted before discussing the tractors, the road trips and the grapevines that keep him grounded.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
1
Family
I consider my closest friends my family, but certainly at the center of my universe is my wife and my boys. I can have an exhausting day and no matter what, when I come home and I get to see my wife and I get to see my kids, it makes all of the other stuff go away.
2
The Ruby Mountains in Nevada
Mount Jefferson is almost 12,000 feet and there’s this insane plateau on the top of it, this huge meadow mesa, and in the summertime it’s filled with bighorn sheep. There’s a lot of Native American artifacts up there. You can see these rock outcroppings where they would have their hunting camps and their tents. You can imagine what it was like 1,000 years ago to be sitting in that place.
3
Digging in the Dirt
Growing up on a vineyard, one of my favorite things to do was to ride on the tractor with my dad. So as soon as we bought our Sonoma place, I went out and purchased a couple of tractors. I got a Kubota Skid Steer because there was a lot of cleaning-up work to do. Then I got a vineyard tractor, a narrow New Holland. And up here I’ve got a utility tractor. The boys love being able to dig holes and have a bucket and all the fun attachments that I can put on it.
