‘9-1-1: Lone Star’: Sierra McClain on Grace’s Loss of Control Revisiting Dad’s Infidelity

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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1: Lone Star Season 4 Episode 13 “Open.”]

It was in Season 2 that Grace (Sierra McClain), thanks to a call her husband Judd (Jim Parrack) was on, learned her father cheated on her mother. It’s now in Season 4 of 9-1-1: Lone Star that the family actually talks about it.

And since this is a drama, it of course all comes out in the worst way possible. Grace reluctantly agrees to let her parents babysit Charlie, only for her father to have a heart attack as they are. (He’ll recover.) And it’s in the hospital that Grace discovers her dad told her mom everything. But now, they can start healing.

McClain takes us inside this episode and teases what’s ahead.

Back in Season 2, was there anything you’d wanted to see when Grace’s father’s infidelity came up again that was part of this script?

Sierra McClain: Yes, her just straight not only confronting it, but also dealing with a character flaw that she has. We’ve seen with Grace that she has this thing where she doesn’t like to ask for help. That’s in her every day, “Oh yeah, I know I’m hurt, but I can go to the store, I can do this, I can do that.” But not asking for help in an area like this yields very different results and more detrimental ones if you don’t seek it, and you see that very clearly in this episode, and that was what I wanted to see from her. I wanted to pull that out of her, and I really wanted to see her have a moment where she didn’t seem as strong as she normally does.

Yeah, because Grace didn’t talk to her father about what happened until that line about him getting into trouble came out in what she said was the worst way. Was there any other way she was ready to bring it up?

It doesn’t seem like it, right? Because she’s gone all this time and has done things that even I didn’t agree with. I was having a hard time with her not talking to him and them not being around the family and around the baby. But it was so honest that I just had to not touch it. But it doesn’t seem like there was any other way besides tragedy. I’m glad that it didn’t end completely in it because sometimes it takes things like that for people to realize the consequences of their actions or even their silence.

Judd says Charlie can feel the tension, and it’s true. It was that bad.

It absolutely was that bad. It makes me so sad to think about because I feel like in this episode, everything came to a head at one time, and I’ve been living with Grace for all this time. She’s buried it so deep that when it comes up, it really comes up and you just see and feel and are hit with everything.

Scott Everett White/FOX

Especially because now she’s a mother, so she’s thinking of it in terms of an entire family, like from her mother’s perspective. 

I agree with you fully, and I love the fact that even though she is a mother, it still hasn’t clicked to her. She hasn’t made the correlation between her mistakes versus her father’s mistakes, because the truth is that as a parent you are going to mess up. And I think as soon as we get to comparing mistakes is when we end up in trouble — in certain situations. Some are obviously more severe than others and that is a completely different ballpark. But I think in an area like what Grace was dealing with, even though she had Charlie, she wasn’t able to really see it until she had that resolved because her anger and her pride and all that stuff was clouding her judgment.

We’re so used to seeing Grace completely in control when she’s at work, but then comes the call with her mom and her supervisor was right to step in. But was Grace aware of how different she was on the call? She’s so used to those situations just not when it’s that personal.

Exactly. And that was the main difference. I’m so glad that we got to show that because Tim [Minear] and I had a conversation about this very scene. I said, “Tim, it would be so interesting if Grace just completely kind of flew off the handle when it came to her mom and we show such a stark difference from how she normally handles these kinds of situations because it is very personal.” I feel like if she had not had that argument with her father, she would’ve been able to keep her head on a little bit more. But because all of this was kind of boiling in her in that very moment where she felt responsible and she was like, “Did I cause this? Did I do this?” She lost it.

Talk about filming that scene, because normally when you’re at that desk, Grace is completely in control, but not here.

I can’t lie, I was a little nervous because I felt very much so out of my comfort zone. You’re exactly right. Normally I approach all the calls a certain way and then we’ll play with them and color ’em as we see fit for each situation. But that was one where it’s just like everything that you’ve learned in this call center goes out the window for a second, even Sierra as an actress and everything that I have picked up as I have sat at that desk. It was a nerve-wracking scene and hopefully it makes the audience as nervous as it made me to shoot it.

Once Grace’s singing was brought up early on, I was waiting for you to sing. Talk about filming that scene, especially since Grace’s sisters were played by your sisters (Lauryn McClain and China McClain).

If I’ve ever felt more like Sierra in a moment… It’s weird because it still felt like Grace even though I was doing something that I feel more comfortable doing as Sierra, which is singing, and then my sisters were there. This was a very, very special moment. It was a very different moment for Grace and probably for 9-1-1 as a whole. I talked to my sisters and Tim a lot about it. He has so many great ideas, and he’s so open to just whatever. We had different ways that we wanted to approach it. We’re like, “It’s not a musical, so we don’t want it to feel like that. We want it to feel as authentic as possible.” My mother has had health issues and my sisters and I, we’ve been in the hospital with my dad who does so much of our music, and we’ve rehearsed with her in the hospital room. It wasn’t completely foreign. We just fell into that a little bit to try to make it feel as natural as possible.

It felt like a family moment, which Lone Star has plenty of.

That’s absolutely very true. I think the music aspect was the only thing that may be a little new and different, but that’s what made it special, too.

Scott Everett White/FOX

I want to see Grace with her sisters again in happier circumstances because the end did such a good job of showing their relationship as well as her sisters’ with Judd.

Yes, and one of my favorite things — I didn’t even realize it until we were shooting it and after — and the cool thing about bringing in people that are actually related to you is that you don’t just get that underlying real-life relationship in the characters, like with Grace and her sisters. You get it with characters like Judd, too, because they know Jim and they have their own relationship and it’s not just like that with him, but with a bunch of other characters. So I’m excited, if and when they bring them back, to see the relationships that they actually do have with some of the other cast because this cast is so close, we know each other’s significant others and husbands and wives and siblings, we all know each other.

Something I like is that Grace and her dad aren’t pretending that just because of this health scare, they’re suddenly OK. They still have things to talk about. But Grace is feeling optimistic about their relationship, right?

Yes, and I thought it was beautiful the way that Tim ended it. I really didn’t see any other way to end it because that’s true. It’s not like everything disappears, but sometimes things like that happen where it doesn’t end in tragedy, but it just kicks open the door and it takes the power out of some of these things that have held so much contention between you and the person that you love. It does open up the doors for just a new fresh and healed relationship between her and her dad and the rest of her family.

What’s coming up for Grace and Judd?

I always say this and I always mean it: They’re going to be hit with some things that they haven’t dealt with before. And every time Lone Star throws a curve ball at them, you get to see a new side of their relationship, whether it be how strong they are or maybe some of the flaws in their relationship. Both are great for the two of them. You’ll get to see them be put in positions where they have to have conversations and they’re not sure what to do and they’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. But I think at the end of the day, you really do get to see how much they love each other no matter what happens.

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What else is coming up for Grace? Any wild calls she takes or anything outside of work?

She’s going to get up from her desk, that’s for sure, maybe even be out in the field a little bit. I hope that this starts a bit of a new venture for Grace where you see her a little bit more in the action.

When are we getting more Grace and Carlos (Rafael Silva) scenes?

You are going to get a little bit more Grace and Carlos, or Crace, as Raf so affectionately has dubbed them. That’s going to be something super fun for the audience because you’ve seen them do some detective work and problem solving together. And I will definitely say it’s not the end of that. It’s really great because Raf and I have a good relationship in real life. We got closer these last couple seasons and so it’s fun to actually be able to play those things with him now that we are as close as we are.

9-1-1: Lone Star, Tuesdays, 8/7c, Fox