Nashville’ stars Chris O’Donnell and Jessica Capshaw preview ‘soapier’ spinoff (exclusive)

Working on 9-1-1: Nashville has proven to Chris O’Donnell that “life is stranger than fiction.”

“Every time they tell me about the next crazy emergency, I think ‘There’s no way…’ and then they show me an article about it happening,” the NCIS: Los Angeles alum tells Entertainment Weekly of his new ABC drama, the second expansion of the 9-1-1 universe (following 9-1-1: Lone Star, which ended earlier this year).

O’Donnell stars as Don Hart, captain of the 113 firehouse, where he works alongside Taylor Thompson (Hailey Kilgore), Roxie Alba (Juani Feliz), Blue Bennings (Hunter McVey), and Ryan Hart (Michael Provost) — the latter being Don’s son with Blythe (Jessica Capshaw).

“Jessica, we’ve kind of overlapped a little bit on shows over the years, but we hadn’t really had a lot of work together. And she’s terrific. I’ve really enjoyed working with her,” says O’Donnell, who met Capshaw when he was recurring on The Practice in the early 2000s. (He also recurred on Grey’s Anatomy, but prior to Capshaw’s tenure on the medical drama.)

“My first scenes were with Michael, who plays our son,” Capshaw recalls. “I think it was the first day of filming, and we were both kind of nervous. Everything was brand new. We were figuring out the scene, and we had horses with us, and we were in a lot of clothes and it was really hot. But we just got on, and it was just great. And then Chris came and we put together the family piece of it, and the three of us were working together, and that really worked.”

“This show is a true family affair,” 9-1-1: Nashville showrunner Rashad Raisani adds of the new series, which also stars Kimberly Williams-Paisley as Blythe’s sister Cammie Raleigh, a 911 dispatcher; and LeAnn Rimes as Blue’s mother, Dixie Bennings.

“This show has a soapier, kind of Succession or Dynasty element that the other 9-1-1 shows maybe don’t,” says Raisani. “It keeps Jessica and keeps LeAnne involved in the show, even if neither of them are first responders themselves. Luckily, we have two great actors and the gravitational force pulls the narrative towards them.”

That will be a comfort for Capshaw to hear.

“She’s not a firefighter, she’s not at the firehouse, she’s not in the emergencies,” the actress says of her character. “Well, sometimes she is in the emergencies, but she’s not a thread in that fabric. I’m like, ‘Wait, how am I supposed to compete with an emergency in the storyline? I can’t be a tornado!’ You know what I mean? So I’m like, ‘All these storylines that are happening at home, we’ve got to make them really compelling.'”

Capshaw’s Blythe may not be a first responder, but she is a skilled business woman and equestrian.

“She comes from this aristocratic southern family that goes back six generations,” says Raisani. He adds of Don and Blythe, “We took some inspiration from the Vanderbilts and said, ‘Okay, imagine that there’s this child of that family and then this very blue-collar firefighter shows up to put out a fire at their horse stables. And then they kind of become this, at least in her dad’s point of view, star-crossed lovers.” (As O’Donnell puts it: “Blythe comes from a very powerful family, and fate kind of brought them together.”)

Capshaw happily recalls an early phone call with Raisani where he first described her character.

“He starts talking about what it’s like for her to have come from this really big, notable family…. And he knows who my family is, but in the moment he just wasn’t making the connection,” the star — daughter of marketing manager Robert Capshaw and actress Kate Capshaw, and stepdaughter of Stephen Spielberg — says with a laugh. “And so I was like, ‘Well, there you go!'”

As for Rhimes’ Dixie, “she represents the grittier side of Nashville,” says Raisani. “And she had a child of her own, Blue, who really represents somebody who came up with no privilege whatsoever. We wanted to find a way to make them all kind of slam into each other. That was sort of the origin of how we started to put the show together.”

To flesh out the cast, Raisani wanted to highlight the diversity of the city. He describes Juani Feliz’s Roxy as “a lesbian from New York who came to Nashville due to her past backstory, and she’s finding refuge here.” And Taylor, played by Tony nominee Hailey Kilgore, “represents the songwriting and the music — the heartbeat — of Nashville. We started to kind of mix all those elements together and then ended up where we did.”

And let’s not forget the emergencies, which Raisani wanted to be “very specific to Nashville.”

In addition to a call in the premiere episode involving real-life country star Kane Brown, Raisani teases “these incredible gigantic tornadoes that wreak havoc on the city and put Airstream trailers on the Korean Veterans Memorial Bridge in downtown Nashville” and a “horrific accident” involving a runaway “pedal pub” bachelorette party. (“To the bane of the Nashvillian existence, it’s the Bachelorette Capital of the World,” he explains.)

Running point on all the calls is O’Donnell’s Don, whom the actor describes as “straddling two different worlds a lot of the time.”

“He has two different families, really,” he continues. “He’s got Blythe and his son, and that is the focus of his life. But he’s also got the firehouse, and his family there — because that really is a family. And for someone that didn’t grow up with a ton of family…. I think probably that’s part of what the attraction was for him originally getting into this line of work, and then he married into a large family.”

O’Donnell says its been humbling and inspiring to learn what first responders deal with on a daily basis —both in training and working on the series, as well as watching firefighters in action around his beloved Palisades neighborhood during the Los Angeles wild fires earlier this year.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

“Every time I see a firetruck go by or I pass a fire station, I’m so curious now what’s the dynamic in there, what does their station look like inside?” he says.

And many are wondering the same about station 113.

They’ll find out when 9-1-1: Nashville premieres Thursday, Oct. 9, at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.