CHICAGO — “Chicago Fire” premiered in 2012 on NBC, and in the years since the show has seen its share of casting changes. It’s the nature of any long-running TV series. Even so, consistency is also what keeps audiences coming back and Joe Miñoso, who has been with the show from the start, has been a reassuringly familiar face at the fictitious Firehouse 51.

But with Season 15 — the show’s 300th episode — his character Joe Cruz is finally hanging up his fire gear for good. As for the show’s original cast, only Taylor Kinney, David Eigenberg and Christian Stolte remain as series regulars.

And Miñoso won’t be gone forever; he is likely to return to “Chicago Fire,” both in front of the camera and behind.

“The cast just threw me a party and they made T-shirts that say ‘I love my life,’ which is what I used to yell out right when we were going to go into a major stunt in a roomful of fire.”

Is that how he would psyche himself up?

“Yes, but I meant it! And I didn’t need that motivation. When they yell ‘fire up!’ and that room completely goes up in flames and you’re about to walk through this and be a badass, the adrenaline kicks in all by itself. The very last incident I filmed, I walked out of there filthier than ever and it was appropriate. I wouldn’t change a thing, but man it’d be hard to do it all again, especially now.” Fifteen years takes a toll on the body, even for a pretend firefighter.

We talked about Miñoso’s time on the show and what’s next.

Q: How did this decision come about? Was it yours? Was it the show’s?

A: Weirdly mutual. I’ve been moving into a different space creatively over the last couple of years doing a lot of directing and producing short films here in the city. This summer, I wrote, produced, directed and starred in a short called “Long Lost” that’s about two long-lost brothers, one a day-laborer and the other an ICE agent. What inspired the whole thing was I saw a video of an ICE agent asking a laborer, “Where are you from? I can tell you have an accent,” all the while, having a Latin accent himself. I couldn’t understand the dissonance there. The system is insisting on dividing us into these moments of tragedy, so I wrote it like a Greek tragedy. There are no winners and everybody is losing. We’re currently editing that and then we will be going into the festival circuit.

And while that was happening, we kind of realized that (on “Chicago Fire”) we have told Cruz’s story. Fifteen years in, this guy has gone from a goofball young firefighter dancing Zumba to somebody who is an established leader on the team and a husband and a father. So the timing felt right. With the 300th episode coming up, it felt like an opportunity to move forward.

And immediately after the decision was made, we started talking about me directing episodes of “Chicago Fire,” so I’ll be doing that later this season.

Q: Because you know everyone in the cast and crew and you know how the show works, you may have insights that a director coming in cold just wouldn’t.

A: That is exactly right. I’ve had the great privilege already of shadowing (directors) four or five episodes this season, including Reza Tabrizi, (a producer and director on the show) who began as a camera operator in Season 1. Just to see his evolution has been so inspiring and he has been such a champion. The last day of filming last season was when I learned that we would be moving on from the character, and within 20 minutes of that Reza approached me and said, “If you still want to direct, your name’s on the list.” It was kind of a whiplash moment. I can’t believe this is the end of this run, but also here’s the beginning of a whole new one.

Q: What was your headspace going into this season knowing you would be leaving?

A: It was super emotional. Lots and lots of tears. And lots and lots of love. I couldn’t be luckier. Being on the show gave me a lot of stability. But also, the show is designed to lose people. There’s just so many opportunities for someone to fall into peril and the world of the show insists upon it. We have to be able to show that these things happen. This is the reality of that livelihood. So I’ve been on borrowed time on the show for a decade

But this season, I was also so overwhelmed with shadowing the directors and discovering what a director for a network television show does. Technically, directing is significantly more work than being an actor, and when you are shadowing, they tell you “Pretend it’s your own episode and do all the work,” so I was so swamped that I was distracted and didn’t really process the fact that I was leaving. And maybe I did that on purpose. Once I find myself either without anything to do or at a crossroads in my life, I tend to start throwing a million things at the wall and hoping something sticks.

And Victor Teran, the new showrunner, has said in interviews that this doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t some type of return for the character in the future.

Q: That’s in contrast to how Yuriy Sardarov, who played Otis, left the show when his character died in Season 8. Were you curious: Do I get to live or not?

A: Oh god, I think I’ve been thinking that for 10 years! I’ve been leaving every season with dread: Is this the cliffhanger that finally takes me out?

To Reza and Victor’s credit, it was a very open dialogue about how we would deal with Cruz’s exit and one of the things we broached was killing him off and seeing the ramifications of that throughout the house. And what we landed on was, we think we can get more storyline out of a firefighter who loves his job and is obsessed with what he does and just wants to fight to get back, and has to deal with depression and has to deal with physical ailments and confronting his family. So they settled on the storyline that they did.

As soon as Victor got the job (Teran became showrunner this season, taking over from Andrea Newman), he reached out to me and said, “If you have any ideas about Cruz’s exit …” And I said, “I have a million ideas!” No, that’s not right. At first I said, “I have no ideas,” and then I was up until three in the morning, because a wave of ideas came to me. And I wrote a long treatment about what might be appropriate and he responded really well to a lot of it. And when it was decided that Matt Whitney was going to be the writer of the 300th episode, I started throwing around ideas with him.

Q: It sounds unusual to incorporate an actor’s perspective and thought process into these decisions.

A: It felt special, I definitely can say that. It’s been such a wave of new energy, because that happens when new leadership comes in, regardless of who it is. But Victor has built a very open-door policy and has made it very clear that he’s interested in our thoughts, especially those of us who have been inside the character’s skin for so long.

Q: Do you know what’s next for you?

A: I’m focused on my production company in the city, so I plan to stay in Chicago. I left in 2012 after Snowmageddon (two years prior) when I almost got stuck on Lake Shore Drive. I was lucky to make it out right before it became a total parking lot. Horrible. And that’s when I decided to move to Los Angeles. (At the time, Miñoso had been a longtime theater actor in Chicago.) I packed two bags, sold everything, subleted my place and the day I signed my lease in Los Angeles is the day I booked the gig on “Chicago Fire” — and since then, I have experienced Chicago weather in more intimate ways than I ever thought I would!

Q: That’s a funny turn of events. Just when you think you got out, the city pulls you back in!

A: It’s ridiculous, right? And that’s exactly why I feel like I owe the city so much.

I reached out to Yuriy a week or two into this season and we were reminiscing about old times on the show and I was like, “I think the world would want to do this with us.” So we’ve had a couple of conversations with NBC and it looks like we’re going to do a rewatch podcast. We’ll start from the very beginning in Season 1 and have a guest on every week. Charlie Barnett has agreed to be our first guest, which we thought made sense because we ended up moving in together (in real life) for the first year of the show, so there’s plenty to talk about there of us as roommates.

Q: And figuring out what it meant to be a TV actor on this big network show for the first time.

A: Oh my god, yes! We were previously unemployed and unknown prospects and it felt like we landed in Scrooge McDuck’s pit of gold coins! We were so eager and so excited to have any kind of job, let alone this one, which was about family and brotherhood and you get to be a hero and you get to do all these cool stunts. We were kids in a candy store. Me being 10 years older than those guys was an experience; I had already gone through my 20s and the kind of (stuff) they were trying to get into. In some ways, it revitalized that for me. But at the end of that year, I quickly realized, I think those years are behind me. And then the very next year my future wife (makeup artist Caitlin Murphy Miles) walked into the hair and makeup trailer.

Q: What are some skills you’ve learned? You learned how to drive a fire truck.

A: I’m the only one of the actors who hasn’t hit something with that thing at this point, so that’s a badge of pride. It was daunting to drive it. I remember during the pilot, I had to do a giant U-turn on Wacker Drive and we had our boom operator or sound mixer strapped to the ladder of the truck and I took this turn a little too hot. I came in screaming a little bit! And it wasn’t until mid-turn that I was like, oh my god, there’s something hanging for dear life on that ladder and it forced me to slow down. His name is Karl Dondlinger and he told me, “Dude, I saw my life flash before my eyes.” He’s my sound mixer now whenever I do stuff (outside of the show), just to repay him in some small way for that terrifying moment.

I think something else I learned was staying calm and not allowing something that feels disastrous to actually become that. The biggest takeaway from being with all these people is if you stay calm and allow yourself to think through something for a minute, you’d be surprised what you’re able to accomplish.

But I keep fire extinguishers everywhere. And I water my Christmas tree every day.

Q: Any interest in doing theater again?

A: Yes, but it also terrifies me. It’s been so long since I’ve had to sit in a character for more than an hour at a time. We shoot the show in 10-minute increments. The scenes can take hours to do, but you’re doing it in 10-minute increments. So I’ve become a sprinter and I’m curious if I still have the cross-country in me. But it does intrigue me and please put out there that I am open and available to all calls and would entertain them all.

But for the moment, I’m working with (Chicago playwright and screenwriter) Brett Neveu on developing a feature film. So I’m hoping we can get that happening this summer. It’s an adaptation of a play he wrote that I did in 2011 at Writers Theatre called “Do the Hustle” (about father-son con artists). We were working on it in late 2019 and it got derailed by COVID, and then he reached out to me my last week of filming (on “Chicago Fire”) to talk about exploring the project again and I was like, “I’m a week away from having absolutely nothing to do, so let’s absolutely do that!” A total coincidence of timing.

Q: Are you recognized by firefighters when you’re out and about?

A: Oh my gosh, tons. And it’s funny because there are those who pretend that they don’t watch the show, and then there are those who are like, “Man, I love the show!” Tons of paramedics come up to us, too, and they say, “You do us proud.” And it chokes me up, because we try.

Tony Ferraris, who’s Tony on the show, he was a real, working firefighter for a decade while he was on the show. And there are times when you’d be doing stuff that’s obviously for television but it’s not necessarily the most efficient way to do it as a firefighter and you’d go up to him and say, “Is this how you do it, Tony?” And he’d go, “Nah, not really.” But we do our best and try to show these people in a really good light.

I got stuck in an elevator in my condo a decade ago and had to call the fire department to get me out and I recorded that interaction. It was an amazing moment. When they showed up, they immediately knew who I was. They pried the doors open and one of the guys looked at me and goes, “Get the (expletive) outta here!” and I turned my phone around and was like, “That’s why you call the Chicago Fire Department.”

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