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Diane Farr is seen here playing division chief Sharon Leone in the CBS series Fire Country. (Photo: ... More Courtesy of Diane Farr/ Fire Country)
Courtesy of Diane Farr/Fire Country
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.
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