9-1-1’s Oliver Stark and Ryan Guzman Break Down Some Fan Favorite Buddie — And Solo — Scenes

Oliver Stark and Ryan Guzman are taking a look back with Us at some of their most memorable 9-1-1 scenes.

Stark, 33, and Guzman, 37, who star as Evan “Buck” Buckley and Eddie Diaz, respectively, have become fan-favorite characters over the show’s eight seasons — largely in part to the duo’s close onscreen friendship (and, at times, speculated romance). It’s no surprise that some of their most iconic moments on the show have been together, from fights to saving each other’s lives and more.

Filming together, however, isn’t always as easy as it seems behind the scenes. While speaking exclusively to Us Weekly, Stark confessed that the season 4 episode “Suspicion,” in which Eddie gets shot, was particularly challenging — but not for reasons one would expect.

“It wasn’t a particularly heavy day emotionally because we knew he was gonna survive, right? It was a heavy day that I had to keep throwing him over my shoulder, to throw him into the back of the fire truck,” Stark told Us with a laugh. “And most people when they do a scene like that, they’ll ask questions like, ‘Ah, is it OK that your back doesn’t hurt?’ Whatever. This is no word of a lie: Between every single take, Ryan was eating chocolate cake. And I have to throw him over my shoulder. And I’m like, ‘Why are you making yourself heavier for me?!’”

Here, the duo look back at some of their most popular scenes for Buck, Eddie, and the friendship that has been lovingly dubbed Buddie:

Season 3, Episode 9: Buck Asks Eddie to Go for the Title

Oliver Stark: Ah, yeah, this kitchen scene. There’s meant to be, the way that it read to me anyway, it’s a lot of tension. There’s a lot of buildup [to] the point that you’re like, “The heck is about to happen here? Are they gonna fight or what?” And then there’s, like, a smash cut to them playing video games. But it was fun to see the limit that you could take it to, how much you could amp it up and then undercut it with the video games. But I think there’s something previously in that episode where, because we’re talking about fighting, I think I said to him, “I thought you were gonna hit me.” And he says something like, “Bet I can beat you up.” And it goes from there and it’s basically we’re just each trying to one-up each other until smash cut to playing video games with Chris (Gavin McHugh), and I love that the show plays between tones so well. It does feel really intense, but it never takes itself too seriously for too long. I think that’s a strength of the show, and really, this scene is a great example of that.

Season 4, Episode 4: Buck Yells at His Parents to Love Him ‘Anyway’

OS: This seemed very emotional, cathartic. If there’s ever any time you’ve wanted to scream at your parents, this was a really big scene for me and it precedes, if I remember correctly, the “Buck Begins” episode, which is a look back into his childhood. I think we played it lots of different ways, if I remember correctly, how heated it gets. And there’s this line in the scene that I really love, which I just thought was so fitting for Buck. He talks about having walked through fire every single day because of his parents and because of the upbringing. And we find out later, I think later in the episode, that Buck was basically born to be a donor to his brother, who had leukemia. And that gives so much context to his childhood for him. All of that angst that came out of that childhood came spilling out in the scene. I remember Kenny [Choi] came up to me. We shot my coverage and the camera was facing me. And when I would shout at Dee [Wallace], who plays my mom in the show, she would always, like, shudder a bit when I got loud. And Kenny came up and he was like, “You see, she keeps on jumping back? Make sure when it’s on her coverage you shout just as loud to get that kind of scare out of her!” So obviously we did. Her and Greg [Harrison], who plays my dad, are both fantastic actors. So it was just nice for everybody to come together and work for each other in the scene. And I really love the way it came off.

Season 4, Episode 13: Eddie Gets Shot

OS: The scene where Eddie gets shot, it wasn’t a particularly heavy day emotionally because we knew he was gonna survive, right? It was a heavy day that I had to keep throwing him over my shoulder, to throw him into the back of the fire truck. And most people when they do a scene like that, they’ll ask questions like, “Ah, is it OK that your back doesn’t hurt?” Whatever. This is no word of a lie: Between every single take, Ryan was eating chocolate cake. And I have to throw him over my shoulder. And I’m like, “Why are you making yourself heavier for me?” But I was probably throwing him extra hard to spite him back. I think my biggest concern on the day, because I remember getting almost quite in my head about it, is he gets shot from behind and the blood splatters over my face — the timing of me reacting to the blood. Because [if someone’s going to] hide down here with a squirt gun and blast me in the face with blood, it is very difficult to convince yourself you don’t know that’s about to happen, so some part of you is ready to recoil for it, but Buck doesn’t know that it’s about to happen. So trying to trick my brain into, “Here we are just talking, oh, no, here it comes?” That was my biggest difficulty on the day. But the take that we got actually worked perfectly, however many changes of a white shirt that I was wearing later. We really had a lot of fun with that episode, crawling under the fire truck and getting to do all the things that I love to do on the show. The physical stuff and just committing to it. Thankfully it really turned out.

Ryan Guzman: Honestly, the only thing I was thinking about is my cousin, and he had been to war six different tours and he’d seen plenty of people getting shot. And I remember him telling me something about people getting shot and how sometimes it just goes right through you. So it was very kind of graphic, I guess, in my mind. But I was really just trying to keep it calm and grounded for the scene. But yeah, shout-out to my cousin and those that serve.

Season 5, Episode 13: Eddie Breaks Down to Buck

RG: Man, what I’m thinking right there is I am drained. I’ve been crying all day. And I cried on my takes and Oliver’s takes. So it was just nonstop. My eyes were puffy by the end of the night. It was cathartic, I guess it was a release or whatever. Maybe I had been holding on for whatever, for 30 years. It was fun.

Season 7, Episode 4: Buck Plays Jealous Basketball

OS: It was very fun for about an hour and a half. Six hours later, my knees were hurting, I was out of breath. Well, actually, I was out of breath within the first 10 minutes. But it was great. We had a beautiful location and basketball court, as you know if you’ve seen the scene, like, right on the ocean. So we were all really happy to be there. And it just felt like something different for the show. We weren’t in the firehouse, we weren’t in the firetrap. We [weren’t in] one of our houses and we were getting to do something different. None of us are particularly skilled in the art of basketball, which I think is good. If one of us was really, really good and the rest of us were really bad, I think we wouldn’t have had so much fun together. But it was a really fun day of working out different, mostly choreographed plays. I didn’t expect it to go that way. Naively, I thought it’d be, like, just play basketball and see what happens. But it wasn’t, it was a rehearsed almost dance of, “Alright, you’re gonna pass over there so then this guy’s gonna move over here,” and how to set up and tell the story through the plays. I naively just thought I was gonna get to play basketball for a day freely, but it all worked out and we got to tell the story through the game, as it were. And yeah, definitely one of my favorite days as I look back on 9-1-1.

Season 8, Episode 17: Eddie and Buck Fight in the Kitchen

OS: So the most recent Buck-Eddie fight, fueled by grief and differing levels of grief, and Eddie is dealing with the fact that he wasn’t there for the death and Buck is dealing with the fact that he was there for the death. And so those are already two conflicting things, and I love the way this scene came together. I didn’t realize this when we were making it, but it’s all shot handheld, the camera’s kind of shaking at points, and it feels very raw, which I think is very fitting with the kind of emotions that are going on here. I didn’t realize during the scene that Ryan was gonna grab hold of me and lunge at me, but during the duration of the show, we’ve kind of built such a trust, myself, him and the rest of the cast. So you have that kind of sandbox to play in. There’s a high level of trust, so if somebody wants to try something, you feel like you have the space to do that. And I love the way the scene came together.

Us Weekly: So you had no idea that was going to happen?

OS: No, like, “Get off me.”

Us: Did you and Ryan have any conversations before that or did you kind of just go right into it?

OS: No, so the show, we don’t really rehearse beforehand. I mean, obviously, we rehearse on the day and work it out with the director and the [director of photography] and then we set the cameras up. But everybody always comes with their own ideas. And the way that it always comes together is that the best idea in the room wins, which is oftentimes an amalgamation of different people’s ideas. You know, “I thought I wanted to move over here,” and, “Oh, well I wanted to move over here.” Right? “Well, what if we kind of do this instead?” And it just comes together and we’ve gotten quicker and quicker and more in sync with each other at doing that over the years.

RG: Yeah, this scene, it had so many great textures, again, thanks to [showrunner] Tim [Minear]. And Oliver’s, right. We rehearsed it one time, but I did it super bland, mellow as can be. And then the director pulls me off to the side and says, like, “You want to hit him right now? Do you wanna punch him?” And I go, “I don’t know if I wanna punch him! But let’s play with that.” And lo and behold, I started elevating the pushing.