The recent Los Angeles fires have devastated communities, and while much of the blaze has been contained, countless people have lost their homes and livelihoods. According to actress Diane Farr, firefighterswho risk everythingare in desperate need of more funding and support.
Farr, known for her roles in “Numb3rs,” “Rescue Me” and “Fire Country,” has a personal connection to the crisis. With her Altadena home having been on the front lines of the Eaton Fire, she witnessed the destruction of her community firsthand. What’s more, years of firefighter training for her roles on television opened her eyes to how undervalued both professional and volunteer firefighters are.
So read on as Farr shares her experience, sheds light on the difference between structure and wildland firefightersand inspires us to take action for those affected.
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This video interview took place on Jan. 27, 2025 and has been edited for length and clarity.
Reader’s Digest: You portrayed a firefighter on “Rescue Me” and now a CAL firefighter on “Fire Country.”What do you think is the most important aspect of showing the emotional and physical toll that firefighters face, and how has that evolved for you over time?
Diane Farr: I don’t think that people understand just how difficult that job is. We know it’s heroic. We know that they are running into the fire when the rest of us are running out. But it wasn’t until this week that I really realized what a privilege that is. There was a period in COVID where it felt like staying home was a privilege. You needed a couple of things to be functioning in order to drop out of society, to hibernate, to keep safe and now it’s very clear to me that an evacuation order is not just for my safety. It’s a privilege because somebody else is willing to fight for my house, and someone else is willing to go into hell when I am escaping it.
When I started on “Fire Country,” I didn’t know the difference between wildland firefighters and structural firefighters. Almost everything we see on TV is structural firefights. It’s in Chicago, it’s in New York City, it’s in Los Angeles, in the big cities and buildings. CAL FIRE is an organization that’s fighting wildland fires. They can go on campaign fires for weeks or months, and they live on the fire line. So I live in the town next to Altadena, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Right now there is a field filled with tents, and that’s where the firefighters are living, so they have to cook over a little burner. They have only the clothes they went in with. They have only the Department-issued tents and blankets unless something’s been donated to them, and they’re going to live there until it’s done. I didn’t know anything about the incarcerated firefighting program, which is a volunteer service coming out of the prisons. These volunteers will stay even longer because part of their job is to clean up after a fire to make sure that they don’t restart. It’s really unimaginable how hard the work is.
Reader’s Digest: Your home survived the Eaton fire, but the surrounding area was destroyed. Were you home at the time and how have things been for you since the incident?
Diane Farr: I left two days before the fire broke out to go back to filming “Fire Country” in Vancouver. When the evacuation order came in, I was out of the country, but my kids, my partner and house guests were all staying in the house. I was physically safe, but emotionally really strung out trying to get them to safety and working with my neighbors as much as we couldfirst to make sure we were all as prepared as possible, whether the sprinklers were on or whether we were hosing down each other’s roofsbut also to make sure there was no looting and immediately hearing in my kids voices how stressed they were, how racked their nervous systems were.
I have learned, particularly with my children, that if I get them to spend a few hours volunteering for someone else, they will stop thinking about themselves. So even if we do some volunteerism for the selfish reason of giving our own nervous system a break, it gives us a broader perspective, and it makes me and makes my kids feel less helpless. So while I was filming in Canada, I was finding places and friends as people were losing their homes. My kids came back to the house for one hour during the day and collected all the LEGOs in our house so that we could donate them to friends. We have a friend who was doing Amazon donations for firefighters, and we went to unpack Amazon boxes with her for a whole day, and that was really freeing for them.
Reader’s Digest: Giving back during this time is so important. Everyone has been suffering, and you can feel their painno matter their social status.
Diane Farr: The diaspora of the fire gets a little bigger than people realize. When we’re talking about the affluent people in the Palisades, all of their gardeners just lost their jobs, all of their pool supply people just lost their jobs, all of their housekeepers just lost their jobs, their dog walkers and more. People who have the money to rebuild have lost their things. They’ve lost their family heirlooms, they’ve lost their wedding dresses, they’ve lost their kid’s favorite toy. There’s no price for it. And everyone in that area who made a living there is gone.
Now in our area on the east aside in Altadena, it’s clearly not affluent. My kids’ elementary school burned down. That’s a charter school, so getting into that school is literally winning the lottery. The reason why we wanted to go there was it was more progressive. You called your teachers by your first names, and it had an actual landscape of Los Angeles. There were Black families, there were Mexican families, and there were Indian families. My kids are biracial, and our area isn’t just rich familiesit really represented a city. So the school is gone, and I don’t know where the elementary school kids are going yet, but I also know that that’s at least 45 teachers who are out of work and 28 teachers who lost their homes.The fires have affected every level of society.
Reader’s Digest: What ways do you think the portrayal of wildland fires in popular media has changed, and what do you hope “Fire Country” contributes to the conversation?
Diane Farr: I hope the dramatization of the work and the life and what it takes stays in people’s minds when it comes to voting for funding. There’s been a lot of talk about who should be paid, but the truth is that all firefighters should be paid more, whether they’re volunteers or whether this is their profession. At the moment, so much of the funding is going to fighting the fires but all of the firehouses need updating, and all of the trucks need updating. So we need to provide funding for these things. Most of the firehouses that I have visited in New York or Los Angeles all need updates. They all need our support. That’s what I hope the TV shows do for them.
Reader’s Digest: You talked about structural firefighters and wildland firefighters. Can you tell us a bit more about the differences between them and how “Fire Country” highlights those distinctions?
Diane Farr: Structural firefighters were the first ones that I trained with when I was doing “Rescue Me” and I wanted to train with females, and at the time, there were even fewer than there are now. In fact, I found three firehouses that each had one female firefighter. So I trained in Beverly Hills, in the valley of Los Angeles, and in Queens, New York. And it’s really back-breaking work. You’re carrying an air tank. You’re carrying 65 pounds of gear at a minimum, which was a little over half my body weight at the time. You’re running into the building when it’s burning down. The most important thing that I learned is that you never give up your equipment because inside a structure fire, without the equipment, the firefighter is a liability in that fire, rather than an asset.
Then when I got to “Fire Country,” I didn’t know what CAL FIRE was. I thought it was another fire department. They are fighting wildland fires, so that’s why they’re out there for weeks at a time. The wildland fires are coming in closer to the cities, I think, with climate change, when the winds are bigger. Both of these fires started in wildlands and encroached into the city during the Santa Ana winds. Their work is so important, and it goes on for so much longer because it’s wild.
A structure fire can be contained in just a few hours or a few days. And these fires, as we’re all seeing now, go on for weeks where we’re talking about 10% containment, or 30% or 80% where they need continual support. So I’ve learned from them that it’s a longer job, and in some ways it’s less glorious because people don’t know what they’re doing, and I’m hoping our show continues to change that narrative.
Reader’s Digest: Training definitely sounds intense. How long would you say training was for you when you were preparing for “Rescue Me” and “Fire Country?”
Diane Farr: I trained more in my 30s for “Rescue Me” because it was my first time really trying to do the job well, and I was getting a lot of ridicule. But there’s no way I could carry someone out of a fire. I learned very quickly that you drag someone out of a fire, because if I’m in a 12 story building and I carry them down the steps and we both fall, now someone has to save both of us. But if I pull them out and I have their head and I keep it secure, it’s the best thing for both of us.
When I got to “Rescue Me” I was playing the chief and in the protocol of the fire department, the person giving the orders is not generally inside. I learned the difference between a captain and an engineer, along with what a probie is actually doing besides being, as they say, ‘teased and cleaning up all the time.’ I learned about the life cycle of a firefighter and how their job affects them as they get older. So the training was more emotional and understanding what goes into the hierarchy.
Reader’s Digest: What would you say was the most shocking thing that you’ve learned going through training?
Diane Farr: The most shocking thing is how little support there is. When I was growing up, there was a lot of talk about the Benevolent Society. There was one for police officers and there was one for firefighters. And it’s only in the last couple of weeks that I realized that the CAL FIRE Benevolent Foundation even exists. This is an organization that supports firefighters if they are in trouble, and firefighter’s families if the firefighter is in trouble. And it supports burn victims. I have played a firefighter over 25 years, and I’ve never heard of it. I think we’re really not paying attention to how much support is needed, not just when they’re working, but if they’re asked if they’re in retirement or if they’re forced to come off the job.
Reader’s Digest: You mentioned how your community in Altadena is very cultural. How did living there influence your creativity or your career choices?
Diane Farr: I have 15-year-old twin girls and a 17-year-old son. Their dad is Korean, and I was very worried for them to grow up in a white privilege society where people didn’t look like them and people didn’t look different from each other. So Altadena is just such a blessing because it’s one of the few places in California that is a Black neighborhood, predominantly, and it’s really esteemed people in the film business. It’s full of cinematographers, editors, writers and school teachers.
So we’re looking at a really educated community, but we’re also looking at artists who have found their way to a community in a city which was wonderful as a New Yorker to get to, because our cities are often segregated in a way, by class and by race. I think it kept shaping my mind of what the world can be if my kids have never felt like a minority because they’ve never lived in a place where they are a minority, either as an Asian person or a biracial person. But kids also sometimes don’t seem to realize that I’m not the same race as them. My son came home one time and said, ‘I met this girl, and I really like her, and she’s Asian mom.’ I realized that he doesn’t know that I’m not Asian. That’s part of Altadena. I would like to see a reflection of every economic level and every race and every gender, orientation and every kind of love affair, so that my kids know they have choices.
Reader’s Digest: Thank you for sharing your experiences with us. To pivot into the other parts of your career, as a two-time New York Times best-selling author, how do you approach writing compared to acting?
Diane Farr: I use them like a yin and a yang for each other. When you’re working as an actor on set, it’s 200 people all day long, every day, and by the time you get to the end of the week, I don’t want to talk to anybody. On Saturday and Sunday, I want to sit quietly and let my brain reorder itself. So when I finished an acting job, that was when I would go to writing, because it was a creative outlet I could do alone.
After I finished my first book, I went on vacation with 10 people because I missed human beings so much sitting in my room writing stories about people I wasn’t engaged with at that moment. So the quiet of writing works for me for a period, and then it feels lonely. There’s excitement when being on setit’s still a privilege that I get to do the work at alland in order to recharge, I need to go away and do the writing.
Reader’s Digest: One of your books, The Girl Code, resonates deeply with a lot of women worldwide. What inspired you to write it and how has its success shaped your perspective on connecting with audiences outside of acting?
Diane Farr: I wrote The Girl Code because I was on a talk show at the time, “Loveline” on MTV, and all of these magazines would call me for a quick two-line hit about something funny or sexy or relationship-based. They would just write the quote that they wanted for the magazine, which sometimes had absolutely nothing to do with what I was saying, and I kept finding that they were diminishing women with questions like ‘Do I have the right lipstick to attract a man?’ Women are dirtier and more powerful than you’re giving us credit for. So I told myself that I’m going to write a book about the secret conversations I have with my girlfriends, and I’m going to write a book about the Code of Ethics amongst girlfriends. And I was super lucky to be writing right on the verge of at the time was called chick lit [a type of fiction that focuses on the lives of young women].
Chick literature was exploding so big at the time that it was it was translated into so many languages, and I got to go around the world with the book and really just enjoy it with women. We spend so much time as women fighting for equality and fighting for safety. The book was just a good time for all of us.
Reader’s Digest: As someone who’s thrived in multiple fieldsacting, writing, directingwhat advice would you give to others who are looking to diversify their creative pursuits?
Diane Farr: I found that the way I make my living sometimes loses the joy of doing something for fun. So some of the things that I really enjoyed for fun became another revenue stream. So whatever you do for joy is not a waste of time. Whatever you do for joy can feed your heart and can eventually feed your wallet.
The little writing that I was doing on the talk show is the reason why I was able to publish a book, and the book was why I was able to sell a TV show. And writing TV shows was the reason, maybe, that I was allowed to to pursue directing because I understood how to tell a story. So I think using your your time to find joy and to find play and to have recreation and hobbies, if you stick with the things you like, they may feed your occupation.
Rapid response with Diane Farr
Want more fun tidbits about Farr? Check out her answers below.
Readers Digest:Aisle seat or window?
Diane Farr: Window.
Readers Digest:Dogs or cats?
Diane Farr: Dogs.
Readers Digest:Mornings or nights?
Diane Farr: Nights.
Readers Digest:Would you rather time travel to the past or future?
Diane Farr: The past.
Readers Digest:If you werent an actor, what would you be doing?
Diane Farr: Laying on a beach in a foreign country.
Readers Digest:What advice would you give to your younger self if you could?
Diane Farr: It’s not your fault.
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AtReaders Digest, were committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers personal experiences where appropriate. For this interview with actress Diane Farr, Readers Digest Associate Editor Mariah Thomas tapped her experiences as a celebrity interviewer, lifestyle writer and editor of more than five years to ask engaging and exclusive questions to share with readers. This video interview took place on Jan. 27, 2025. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, ourcontributorsand oureditorial policies.
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