One Chicago fans are getting an inside look at their favorite shows — Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., and Chicago Med — with a new weekly podcast on Thursdays. The first two episodes of the One Chicago Podcast dropped on Thursday, September 18 — the perfect way to gear up for the franchise’s return on Wednesday, October 1 — and one of the guests was Chicago Fire‘s David Eigenberg, who shared some things we haven’t seen onscreen.
While sitting down with Brian Luce, a former Chicago police officer who is a Chicago P.D. producer and technical consultant, Eigenberg was asked about what the show’s gotten right that makes it so special. “We get it right a lot,” Eigenberg replied. “We got it right once when they didn’t show it in the show.”
He then detailed something that the cast started doing in the first season during long days outside with an empty water bottle. “We put out arms around each other, like three or four of us, and then we started kicking it and trying to get it through each other’s legs, and we call it water bottle ball or something. It’s stupid. We only play for about 30 seconds or a minute and a half. It goes through a couple times,” he explained.
It was something they once again did when original cast member Jesse Spencer left as a series regular (he’s since returned multiple times as a guest star) in Season 10. “We were all supposed to go out and give a group hug, and we all walked out there, and we put our arms around each other in a group hug, and then somebody dropped a water bottle in the middle of all of us, and we started kicking it around,” shared Eigenberg. “We loved it, and it was like little tears and stuff like that.” But he knows, “It didn’t belong in the show.”
He also admitted that the cast has “a low grade sense of humor,” and behind the scenes, “We are physically aggressive with each other, male and female, not all the time, but we’ve rolled around. You get in bunker gear, you want to wrestle. That’s not a real thing, I think, for real firemen, but we go at it.” When Miranda Rae Mayo first joined the cast (in Season 4), he shared, she joined in. “When she first showed up, she threw me to the ground and jumped on top of me and did some other stuff to me, and I looked up and everyone, we were laughing so hard. She started it. She buried me and I told everybody, I said, ‘She fits in.’” Ten seasons later, she’s one of the leaders of both Firehouse 51 (Truck’s lieutenant) and the show.
Then, when Eigenberg was asked about a character he’d like to bring over to Fire from any of the other Dick Wolf shows — they’re part of the same universe, thanks to crossovers — he immediately picked Marlyne Barrett‘s charge nurse Maggie from Med before sharing, “When we did the pilot with them, people would never notice it, but I had a scene with her [and] I was playing that Herrmann and her had a thing back in the day before I met Cindy [Robyn Coffin] because Cindy’s younger than him. I played it real familiar with her, and they were like, ‘Why are you playing it like that?’ I said, ‘We had a thing.’ They were like, ‘That’s not going to play in the crossover pilot.’”
One Chicago Podcast, Thursdays