Morena Baccarin on Nicholas Galitzine’s He-Man

Morena Baccarin has done her homework on crime fighting.

The actress stars in CBS’s new “Fire Country” spin-off “Sheriff Country” as Sheriff Mickey Fox. The procedural follows Mickey as she leads the police force of her small hometown while struggling with her daughter’s battle with addiction.

“It was so much fun to understand law enforcement and train that way,” Baccarin tells me over Zoom video during a lunch break on set in Ontario, Canada. “We always have someone on set with us to help us with things like: If I suspect someone is coming towards me and they may be armed and I walk out of my car and park, how do I do that? Do I pull out my gun?”

Removing her gun from a holster takes a lot of practice. “Matt Lauria [he co-stars as deputy Nathan Boone] and I joke a lot because half of our time on set is spent practicing pulling the gun out, putting it back in, pulling it out, and putting it back in,” Baccarin says. “You want it to be second nature because when you put that gun back in, you don’t want to look down to see where it is.”

Not that Baccarin will ever feel completely comfortable handling a firearm. “I’ve always been very afraid of guns. I don’t own a gun. I believe if we didn’t have guns at all, a lot of the things we had to deal with wouldn’t happen,” she says. “But I’ve gained a new respect for it. Everyone who has taught us has been incredibly respectful about the gun and when you use it, when you touch it, what you do with it and how to handle it.”

Baccarin says she was certain she wouldn’t be cast in the show when she told producers she would only sign on if the production moved from its planned West Coast location to the East Coast because she wanted to be closer to her family, husband Ben McKenzie and their three children, in New York. “I 100% thought the job was going to disappear when I said that,” she says, adding, “I think that was a big moment for me to realize that I’m valuable enough to them to make that concession. It also makes for a really nice working relationship, not only that they want me, but that we’re partners in this.”

Baccarin reflects on being a working mother in Hollywood. “You’re bound to disappoint someone, sometimes, always, whenever,” she says. “You come to work without doing enough work at home. You miss a birthday, so you make up for it by taking a day off and doing more than you should. It’s a mess. But I try to remind them that even when we’re not together, I think about them, that they are a part of me, and that being able to do what I love makes me a better mother, and that one day they will understand that.”

Baccarin is a well-known face in the superhero world. Her voice work for animated projects is prolific, but her most prominent role is as Vanessa Carlysle in the ‘Deadpool’ films. “It’s been such a long journey. I can’t believe it’s been almost 10 years since we took the first photo,” she says. “I never in my wildest dreams thought it would have turned out like this. We had so much fun shooting it. It was such a fun world. I hope I get to do more of it and participate in it a little more than the last one. [“Deadpool & Wolverine”]. But I understood it was the bro comedy.

Her superhero resume expands with her role as The Sorceress in the upcoming live-action “Masters of the Universe,” opposite Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man.

She says of Galitzine’s muscular transformation for the role: “It’s crazy. I saw him on set and he’d been training for months and months and months, I thought, ‘Oh my god, how did you do that?'”

For Baccarin, participating in the film was a no-brainer. “I grew up watching He-Man, my brother and I, so it was a really big part of my childhood,” she says, smiling. “It was really cool when I got there and saw the costume and what they had in mind for me – the whole outfit and the wig and contact lenses and everything. I’m so excited to see what they think about it, because I feel like my part of it was such a small element of what it’s going to end up being.”