Diane Farr isn’t a firefighter. But she does play one on TV, specifically division chief Sharon Leone in the CBS series Fire Country. That’s entailed her working closely with wildland firefighting experts on the set. Farr’s living in the Los Angeles area has also brought her close-up views of the havoc that wildfires can wreak. Therefore, it isn’t too far a stretch, so to speak, for Farr to want more people to know the facts behind wildfires and the many wildland firefighters who have selflessly been combating this increasing threat. After all, there’s a whole lot of—surprise, surprise—misinformation and disinformation out there about wildfires that’s been spreading like, well, wildfire.

Fire Country Is Diane Farr’s Third Firefighting Role

Fire Country actually isn’t the first time that Farr has played a firefighter. As Farr related during a recent conversation, “[When you are starting as an actor], you don’t really know where you’re going to end up doing most of your work. But for whatever reason this is the third time I’ve played a firefighter, so I have about 25 years of working with three different kinds of firefighters.” She chronicled to me this firefighter acting journey: “The first one was a structural firefighter, which is what everybody knows, when I was on Rescue Main. I trained in three different firehouses because at the time it was really hard to find a woman in a firehouse.”

As Farr indicated, structural firefighters are probably what first comes to mind when you hear the word “firefighter.” These are the ones who respond to alarms and calls when a building, car or some kind of structure may be on fire. But structural firefighters aren’t the only kind of firefighter around.

Farr then jumped to her second fire fighter role—that of a smoke jumper, which she described as “a firefighter who jumps out of airplanes for wildfires. That was unreal I had to learn how to fly a Cessna to play that part because you’d fly you’d fly like airdrops of sludge and you’d fly in firefighters.” She added, “And then they camp and they’d have to sort of work their way out as they take down the fire.”

Farr’s third role as a firefighter in Fire Country, which premiered in 2022, took an even more wild turn— where she played a wildland firefighter. The plot of Fire Country began with the character Bode Donovan, a young convict who tried to shorten his prison sentence by volunteering for the California Conservation Camp Program in which prisoners assist the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, otherwise known as CAL FIRE. This brought Donovan to work with various friends, inmates and elite firefighters—including the character Leon, played by Farr. Together, across the three seasons so far of Fire Country, they’ve been battling the various wildfires plaguing different parts of Northern California.

Farr Has Seen Los Angeles Wildfires Up Close And Personal

The plot is timely because here’s a news flash: wildfires have become bigger and bigger problems with each passing year. Just take a look at the August 2024 post on the World Resources Institute website entitled “The Latest Data Confirms: Forest Fires Are Getting Worse.” Take a wild guess as to what that post said. Yes, it provided lots of data, you know the stuff that should be used to make decisions, showing how wildfires have been getting worse—increasing both in frequency and intensity recently. For example, from 2001 through 2023, the area burned by forest fires increased by about 5.4% each per year.

The latest pieces of evidence that the wildfire situation is getting worse are the 14 wildfires that destroyed large swaths of the Los Angeles metropolitan area and San Diego County from January 7 through 31, 2025. Yes, that was Wintertime in Southern California, which Farr pointed out is not your typical wildfire season. Yeah, wildfire season traditionally has been more of a cruel Summer thing, running from the late Spring to the early Fall in California, because that’s when the vegetation is driest and most able to catch fire. But things seem to be changing for the worse with climate change—you know that thing that scientists have been warning everyone about sort of like how scientists were warning people about pandemics in 2016. Hotter and drier conditions over longer parts of the years coupled with changing wind patterns could make the wildfire threat more of a year-round thing, which would be bad news to everyone but the fires.

Farr’s home was rather close to where the wildfires were raging in January. In fact, she mentioned how the fires were moving in the direction of her home, forcing her to evacuate her house for nine days, before they shifted directions. She also talked about how she learned how to pump water from the swimming pool on to the house to make the house less hospitable for flames. However, she did emphasize that her training on the TV and movie sets doesn’t make her a firefighter, “I have a good deal of training to know what [wildfires and places at risk for wildfires] look like. But I couldn’t actually help in a fire.” It’s sort of like how they don’t announce on an airplane, “Is there anyone from Grey’s Anatomy here,” when a passenger needs medical assistance.