Character actor David Eigenberg is likely best known for spending multiple seasons and two movies romancing (and having to re-romance and plead forgiveness, in the case of the first film) Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda Hobbes on the iconic HBO TV show "Sex and the City."

Eigenberg’s latest television project nowadays, however, is far from high fashion and high living in New York City. Instead of a fiery redhead, Eigenberg now co-stars with actual flames on NBC’s "Chicago Fire," a drama about the dangerous lives for first responders from "Law & Order" franchise master Dick Wolf.

OnMilwaukee.com recently got a chance to talk with Eigenberg while he was visiting Milwaukee promoting the show’s new season, which premieres Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 9 p.m. on NBC, chatting about what to expect from the third season of "Chicago Fire," whether to expect a third movie from "Sex and the City" and his not-so-lofty childhood career aspirations (spoiler alert: not a firefighter). 

OnMilwaukee.com: You guys ended on a pretty massive cliffhanger last season on "Chicago Fire."

David Eigenberg: We do a lot of big events on the show, and we’ve kind of crossed a couple of thresholds where people have not made it on the show. People have died; we’ve lost significant characters on the show. I was like, "Where are you guys going to go for the finale?" And then they came up with this.

We had no idea what was going to occur at the beginning of the season. That was really cool and also really kind of put people on edge, because Dick Wolf’s established a way of producing shows where, basically, anybody is expendable. He doesn’t want to be indebted to any actor, which probably comes from a pretty wise place. Don’t build your show around one specific actor.

It wasn’t a negotiation year, so we were all like, "Are they really unhappy with somebody’s performance?" But there’s a major trauma that occurs here that we’re in a situation that I think is really accurate to the life of the first responders, walking into a situation where you can’t know everything and things go awry.

OMC: Without spoiling anything, what can fans expect coming back this season?

DE: For the season, we’re just going to carry on in the same way. The question has been who’s going to come out of that explosion, and that remains to be seen. I’m sitting here with you; that may or may not answer something for you, although I’ve labeled this the ghost tour.

I think it’s really beautiful season. I love this show because we do kind of an amazing thing. A lot of shows are about success and getting ahead or getting back at somebody or those reality-based television shows. But we kind of built – and it’s kind of grown as we’ve gone along – something that’s about the trials and tribulations of becoming a community. It’s kind of an unspoken thing.

Community is not a beautiful word, but it’s really at the core of what we all do every day. We try to be in concert with our community and try to have that. It’s what keeps us from being lonely. It’s what makes us what we are; we all work together and do something. Somebody builds a road. Somebody builds a skyscraper. Somebody processes your information at your insurance company. Everything that everybody does is intrinsic to the experience. I think we try to grab that and explore that, and I love that about the show.

OMC: A lot of people say today that TV is the new movies, with all these big name actors going to TV and by their own choosing. Do you agree with that?

DE: I do. There’s been the advent of the shows that run 12-to-13 episodes, which is much easier to write than 22 or 24. It’s really hard to write that many shows. So you have a really digestible season that the writers can really dig into and write and really explore two or three issues. When you do 22 or 24, you can’t cover just two or three issues.

They so go deep into it. "House of Cards" is such an amazing show, and it gets so deep into just a few of storylines, and they’re all interwoven. It’s really amazing. You can also really easily binge-watch that. You can jump on a season, and it’s 50 minutes of programming. You can really go through it in two days, five or six hours a day and really get wrapped up in it.

When I was a kid, starting out as an actor – I wasn’t really a kid, I was a young man – TV was not the form that you really wanted to aspire to. It was either Broadway and the theater, or you wanted to be in amazing movies. You wanted to make the next "On the Waterfront."

And really, as time went on, I love television. "Sex and the City" was a great show to work on. It kind of tapped into a zeitgeist at the time that it was on. People still – young people, 18-year-old women – go, "I love that show!" and you go, "Wow, so many years later, it still translates."

OMC: Is there any chance of a third "Sex and the City" movie?

DE: You know, I heard about both the movies from my wife who read about them on the Internet, so that’s how in the loop I am. Michael Patrick (King) and Sarah Jessica (Parker) both said that they felt that there was one more story to tell. And I would love if they did.

The second movie was great in its own way, but the problem was that they were trying to encapsulate the crash of the economy and backstory it against the extreme wealth and craziness of some of the Middle East society and play off of that.

And one of the main elements of "Chicago Fire" is the city of Chicago. We actually shoot every frame of it is shot in Chicago, which a lot of Chicagoans don’t know – which really aggravates me because we’re suffering side by side through that six-month winter in negative 15. The only time we ever shut down is because of lightning, but we never change for rain, snow, ice, sleet or temperature.

But Chicago is such a big part of the show for me, and New York is what we lost in "Sex and the City 2." And I would love for them to land back into that because it’s a great city.

OMC: How much training did you have to do to make sure you had all the firefighting details right for "Chicago Fire"?

DE: Different cities have different protocols that they follow. Our chief technical advisor, who’s with us basically every day, he writes all of the incidents. He’s still active – he’s deputy district chief in Chicago – and he was a member of SQUAD, which is their elite rescue force in the fire department. He is a revered guy who’s been in a thousand fires, he’s lost friends and he’s almost died a few times. He’s not a bravado guy; over the years that I’ve known him, he lets fly some information appropriately at the right time about his career and the things that he’s experienced. And we’ve had some of them on the show.

Different departments in different cities, even in Chicago, might be like, "That’s b*llsh*t," and I’d say my experience is about 80 percent of firefighters say that we get it right.

If you really want to be a technical stickler about it, the main premise of our show is a fraud, because when you walk into a real fire, you can’t see your hand in front of your face. We can’t make a television show like that. We have a lot of smoke and a lot of fire, and it’s all real fire – it’s not the black smoke that you can’t breathe in off of a burning mattress – but the basic premise is false.

That’s where I go if you’ve been in a fire, you crawl the halls, and you follow the wall with one hand. Because, when we did the training, you can get lost in a 4-by-4 closet in a heartbeat. It happened to me. You crawl in there, you have all this gear and equipment banging into stuff, there’s all this crap in there, you follow the wall and then you forget where the door is. And that happens. That’s how civilians die, and that’s how firefighters die. The smart ones figure that sh*t out, but when you’re young and don’t know and it’s overwhelming …

OMC: Did you want to be a firefighter when you were growing up?

DE: For a good chunk of my youth, I wanted to be a janitor and run a boiler system in a big building. I was heavily influenced by a children’s book called "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel," which is a really sad, kind of broken story about this guy and his steam shovel and time passing them by. The evolution of the mechanical cycle passes them, and they find their own. So I was always fascinated by the janitors in my grade school and the boiler room (laughs).

I was talking to the main guy from "Justified," Timothy Olyphant, with a couple of people, and he was talking to his kids about his dreams and how they didn’t come true. He wanted to be an Olympic swimmer. He had worked toward that, and that was his life story. He swam in college, and he was recruited to a good college for the swim team. He just didn’t make the Olympic swim team. How did he handle that? Well, he talked about how he got through that.

And then he was like, "You’ve got a kid. What was your dream; did you want to be an actor?" And I said, "Mine was a little different. (laughs) I wanted to be a janitor." That’s the difference between a star actor and a working stiff character actor. I’m very content; I didn’t want to be the Olympic guy.