'Fire Country' Star and Altadena Resident Recounts Her Real-Life Wildfire Experience (Exclusive)

Diane Farr’s life and art are colliding. The actress, writer, and director plays Cal Fire Division Chief Sharon Leone on the CBS firefighter drama Fire Country, where she spends her days pretending to fight wildfires.

And now, wildfire has devastated her own community. Farr lives in Los Angeles County in the town next to Altadena, in the area where the Eaton Fire burned nearly 10,000 structures.

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So she’s using her platform as one of TV’s most prominent fictitious firefighters to rally support for the real Cal Fire firefighters and the incarcerated firefighters who work beside them.

She believes that Fire Country, with its heroic depiction of Cal Fire firefighters and the people of the organization’s inmate firefighter program, can help inspire public support for the firefighters who put their own lives on the line to protect others’ lives and property. And she feels a greater responsibility than ever to tell those firefighters’ stories as best as she can. She’s been part of a show dramatizing Cal Fire and incarcerated firefighters for three years.

But “now it feels nervous-making to get it right,” she tells Parade. “I feel proud to portray them. But in this moment, I have never wanted to get something more right than I have right now, as the world sort of turns their gaze to what wildland firefighters do, and what the incarcerated are doing.”

Diane Farr’s wildfire experience

Farr left Los Angeles two days before the fire broke out on Jan. 7 to go film Fire Country in Canada. But her teenage children and a houseguest were at home and had to immediately evacuate the first day the order came down. So she coordinated the evacuation from afar, making sure her loved ones got to safety and doing whatever she could to make sure her house and her neighbors were protected as well as they could be. “Good for my safety, hard for my heart,” she says.

Her home was spared, but her community was severely impacted. She shared on Instagram that the elementary school her kids attended burned to the ground, and 22 teachers at her kids’ high school lost their homes.

She says that “there’s a lot of chatter” in Los Angeles right now about who to blame and what can be done to avoid devastation on this scale again. But a silver lining is that it’s putting a spotlight on what Cal Fire does and the increased resources it needs to do its work. Cal Fire’s mandate is to fight “wildland” fires in uninhabited areas, but, according to Farr, “Because of the way global warming is working and the way the temperatures are higher, and the winds are more extreme, these wildland fires are coming into residential neighborhoods more frequently and with more force."

Related: Everything to Know About Fire Country Season 3

The "true heroes" of Cal Fire

Farr thinks people don’t fully understand how difficult, demanding, and necessary Cal Fire wildland firefighters and incarcerated firefighters’ jobs are. They live on the fire line in tents until the fire is out, working 24-hour shifts. And then when the fire is out, the incarcerated firefighters will stay behind to clean up, which can take weeks. “Without these two things, none of us are safe,” she says. She knows it’s a privilege that she and her family got to evacuate. “Evacuation is only possible because while we're running out of the fire, these folks are running into the fire, and they're staying until it's done.”

Cal Fire firefighters are “true heroes” who are “really underfunded,” Farr says. She doesn’t want to “bag on” city legislators for things they did or didn’t do, and there’s no way anyone could have funded this much overtime and materials like replacement hoses and trucks. But Farr thinks the firefighters don’t have enough support even under normal circumstances.

“So I'm hoping, in this moment, as we keep turning the lens towards them, the donations will keep coming in,” she says. If people want to help, she encourages them to donate to organizations providing frontline support to firefighters, such as Frontline Impact. On the official Fire Country Instagram account, the cast called for donations to the Red Cross. Or, Farr says, people could bring food to the firehouse in their community to show appreciation for their own local firefighters.

“Bring a tray of lasagna,” she says. “Do anything that you would do for your neighbor who’s working really hard at the moment.”

Related: Fire Country Showrunner Breaks Down Those Fiery Winter Finale Cliffhangers

"A story about redemption"

The Cal Fire fighters will get to go home when the job is done. That’s not the case for the incarcerated firefighters who are supporting them. These inmates are doing a dangerous and essential job, and they’re paid as little as $10.24 a day for it. The Cal Fire inmate firefighter program has been criticized for its low pay and use of prison labor, but as Fire Country dramatizes, it can be a positive, even life-changing thing for the people who choose to do it.

“I think the program is one of the most fantastic things, because there is no rehabilitation through punishment. There's only rehabilitation with dignity and duty,” Farr says.

“I worked in the prison system when I first moved to LA and I was hustling to get acting jobs,” she continues. “I was teaching acting in a maximum security men's prison, and what I found in the classes—this was a place to give people another avenue of how to express themselves—was that eight out of 10 of the men in my classes couldn't read. So we had failed them in a school system, and then we had failed them in a society, and they were insolvent, and the things they had to do to make money were leaving them with zero choices for life. So if we can train someone with an actual skill while in prison, it would only be better for them when their sentence is done, but if we can train them in a skill that elevates them in society, where they're really a part of society, where they're performing a civic duty that elevates them, I think this is the best chance we have.”

“I hope they're paid more,” she affirm. “I hope they're recognized for what they're doing. I hope it starts to break down the shame barrier, like there's a 'them' and there's an 'us.' I think given the right horrible circumstances, every person has the same capacity to commit a crime. If you have to keep yourself fed and you have to keep yourself housed, people will do extreme things. If we can give them a chance to really fit into society, I think this is our best chance for all of us in society.”

Fire Country is about a convict named Bode Leone, who is played by co-creator Max Thieriot. Bode went to prison for committing an armed robbery to support his drug addiction. He’s using the inmate firefighter program to help make amends for what he did.

“Max has been playing a story about redemption,” Farr says. “From the beginning, it started off with, can this incarcerated firefighter fit in the world where he grew up? Now, in the third season, he's out of prison, and it's sort of become, how do we all fit in a society and be a functioning part of it? It's become about legacy. And when I think of incarcerated firefighters, that's what I think of. I think of them changing their legacy. Of course, it's a better story if you came from very little, got in trouble, got out and chose a different path. But nobody does that by themselves. As a society, we have to figure out how to give people a chance instead of punishing them.”

Related: Fire Country Star Max Thieriot Talks Bode's Major Milestone and Sending Off Jared Padalecki

Support the real heroes

Asked if she feels any internal tension about being on a show that depicts wildfires for entertainment purposes while her city is suffering the effects of wildfires, Farr says it motivates her to get the story right.

“I've never believed that television dramas are supposed to be a documentary. But I'm well aware that as people in television, we have a bigger platform to share information than the actual real life heroes doing it,” she says. “The drama on television is going to help inform people, which will help inform voting, which will help inform funding. So if I take myself out of the equation, I'm absolutely thrilled that the show already exists so people can come to it and see and understand what those workers are doing for their community.”

Farr has played a firefighter on TV three different times. In the 2002 TV movie Superfire, she played a smokejumper. In her breakout role on Rescue Me, she played a post-9/11 NYPD firefighter. Now, on Fire Country, she plays a Cal Fire chief. And all her extensive experience in fake firefighting has done is give her a greater respect for what real firefighters do.

“I think we all feel really helpless watching a fire, whether you're sitting nearby or sitting far away,” she says. “I might venture to say that having trained so extensively made me feel extra helpless, because I have a vague idea of what's supposed to be done. I know how to work a hose, and I know how to pull it out of a truck, and I know what tools you need to change the oxygen content of a room to make it smaller, to make it bigger. I have a full outfit with a helmet and boots and gloves that fit me. And yet, if I even attempted to help, I would only be in the way. So it's like that old saying of ‘I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV.’”

What she can do is play her part and hope that people who watch firefighter dramas like Fire Country are inspired to support real firefighters in their communities. Hopefully these shows give viewers “more information, so they vote appropriately for people trying to get more money to these services.”

Fire Country Season 3 returns Friday, Jan. 31 at 9/8c on CBS and Paramount+.

Related: Diane Farr Reveals She Lost Her Voice Due to Anxiety While Directing 'Fire Country'