Chicago Fire's Miranda Rae Mayo Gets Honest About Life Behind The Scenes

In that same most recent episode, "Don't Hang Up," you spent a lot of that episode acting with a phone. Can you get into what that's like, and how you dealt with the particular challenges that presents?

So, from the very start, the actress who was on the other line, she was phenomenal and she was actually in the room with me. She was on the other side of a wall, so I couldn't see her, but I could hear her. And honestly that's really what that episode, those moments were all about. It was about listening and being very present.

As an actor, I was really nervous about it and really excited all at the same time. But my biggest thing was, I didn't want to show anything on my face. I didn't want to show the audience what I was feeling. I just wanted to feel it. I just wanted to be present with her in that space. So it was a great challenge and I learned a lot. Even watching it later, I learned so much.

Were there any wrinkles to that in terms of, you may have felt doing it a certain way as an actor, but then your technical consultants were coming in and saying, "Well, as a firefighter, as someone who's a professional in this position, you would handle it differently?"

Not for this, no. Honestly, personally, one of the things that I kind of struggled against and had a really hard time with was, I wanted to be more urgent, more upset. "We've got to go, we've got to help this girl right away," Some of the feedback that I got was, "You've got it, she is a first responder." This message comes out of nowhere. There's got to be a sense of rationality behind what she's doing. Her whole thing is to keep calm and to not get emotional so she can help. I was kind of worried about coming off cold. I think that Stella, especially in her wanting to become a Lieutenant and to be trusted as a leader, there's something about keeping your emotions in check so that you can help. At the same time, she finds out that this is one of her Girls on Fire, and then the stakes become much higher.

Why do you think that moment is such a linchpin for Stella as she moves toward her Lieutenant test?

I think because she, up until this point, really has been feeding off of the observations of her superiors. I think that being Lieutenant is something that she has thought about, but never in a very serious way where that's what she has been actively pursuing. It's not until Boden kind of takes her off to the side and is like, "Hey, you can do this, right?" Then she really starts to believe that it's possible, because he sees it in her. I think that this is a turning point for her because she proved that to herself, that she is that thing that they see in her. It's not just something that they're imagining; she really proved that to herself.