Wildfires Don’t Care About Zip Codes
Adrienne Lynn and BJ McDonnell on Escaping the L.A. Wildfires and Trying to Rebuild What They’ve Lost
On January 7, 2025, Adrienne Lynn, a renowned makeup and special effects artist in the film industry (Under the Silver Lake, Annabelle Comes Home, Feud), and her husband, BJ McDonnell, an established director and motion picture camera operator (Salem’s Lot, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, The Fall Guy), lost their home to the deadly Los Angeles wildfires.
In one day, everything that made up their sanctuary for more than 20 years vanished into thin air. Now, displaced, defeated, and on the receiving end of a mountain of bills, appointments and medical issues, the hardworking couple is struggling. Putting the pieces of their life together again encompasses a myriad of obstacles, but truly, all that Lynn and McDonnell really care about at the end of the day is getting back into their old neighborhood again.
“I would be happy to live in a tent, I don’t even care,” Lynn tells me about their efforts to regain their home base. “We’ll sleep in our cars. It is such a beautiful view, it’s a beautiful neighborhood. We like our community. We don’t know what that looks like, to be able to be back there, but whatever it is, we’re going to try and make it happen.”
Sequestered in Sunset Mesa, near the Palisades, Lynn and McDonnell’s home has been in their family for generations, dating all the way back to when McDonnell’s grandparents bought the empty lot in the 1960s. “The beauty of the neighborhood is that you could get into the city, but you could also get away from it,” says McDonnell. “They didn’t even have power lines. They put all the electricity underground, so everything was all about the view that you had, and the mountains behind you.” He continues, “We’ve seen fires come close, but you never think it’s ever going to really hit you. It was just pretty tragic.”
McDonnell’s grandfather, Leif Erickson, an actor and World War II veteran, found himself stationed in Pensacola, FL, where McDonnell’s grandmother Ann was residing at the time. The pair instantly fell in love, and when the war was over, Ann joined Leif out in California, where he pursued acting, appearing in productions like On the Waterfront and The High Chaparral, and together they searched for a place to begin their forever home. “They lived in Tarzana for a while, and then my grandfather was like, ‘I always wanted to live by the water,’” recalls McDonnell, who spent some time himself growing up on the bayou in Florida. “So they went out to our neighborhood that we have now, which is Sunset Mesa, and they found this whole place that wasn’t even built yet. It was just plots of land and cement slabs, and you could choose from five different model homes.” Together, the Ericksons laid down roots on the very same ground that the McDonnells later moved into, and eventually inherited.
“The hard part about losing the house is the memories that we felt when we walked in,” says McDonnell. “You could actually still remember your past, and have the memories of seeing your grandmother in the kitchen cooking, and your grandfather in the living room.” Lynn, who has been partnered with McDonnell for nearly two decades now, had grown very close to Ann, and the two ladies spent many nights together making meals and watching movies in their spare time. “It’s the irreplaceable memories that keep us up at night,” says Lynn. “[The house has] been there since the ’60s, so all of those generations of memories and photo albums and things that aren’t in the cloud—like, it’s not the digital-age stuff, hard drives—all of that’s gone. That’s the hard part of everything, is the sense of loss from heritage and history.”
In a meet-cute straight out of the movies, Lynn and McDonnell were first introduced way back in 2008 while working on Jolene, a film that would later be known as Jessica Chastain’s breakout role. “We’ve been together for about 18 years,” remembers Lynn about the “total cliché” of meeting her husband while filming. “The first day on set I saw BJ, and he had this big mohawk, and I was wearing print stuff that you’re really not supposed to wear to set—I had no idea—and we just locked eyes, and that was it. We were together nonstop from that point forward. I moved to L.A. shortly after, and then we moved in together. It was very quick, and we’ve been together ever since.” McDonnell, who also swears it was love at first sight, happily recalls the start of their story. “Every day we’d sit at lunch, and it was so cheesy, we’d be listening to each other’s music with those little earpods when they were first coming out,” Laughing, he continues, “We’d spend every day, all day, together. We were just inseparable.”
In a move that sweetly resembles the actions of his grandfather, McDonnell brought Lynn out to Los Angeles to join him and his grandmother Ann under the very same roof that she and Leif had originally built back in the age of flower power and free love. Lynn took to her new home like a fish to water, and it wasn’t long before she became part of the family unit as well as a valued member of her local community. “It’s a very Norman Rockwell kind of vibe, where all the holidays come, and everybody’s putting up lights, and getting hot chocolate, and there’s carolers,” says Lynn, who reminisces on trick-or-treaters at Halloween and friendly dinners with the family who lived across the street. “Everybody looked out for everybody, and it felt very safe. The industry is so demanding. After a really long day of work, after working 60- or 80-hour weeks, just knowing you could drive home and have this little sanctuary was everything.”
On the morning of January 7, everything changed. California’s ferocious Santa Ana winds, combined with the dry vegetation during drought season (and arguably, powerful climate change expediting conditions), quickly snowballed into one of the worst natural disasters in the nation’s history. Having lived on the property for half of their lives, Lynn and McDonnell were no strangers to wildfires, but the speed with which the blaze burned the land far exceeded everyone’s expectations, experts included.
For Lynn, more than anything, the moment boiled down to a gut reaction. “It was just like an eerie feeling. I can’t even explain it,” she recalls. Despite the fact that the couple knew that the winds were coming, the previous evening’s eerily calm atmosphere created an illusion of safety. In an attempt to be optimistic, they hoped that the meteorologists warning them about the high velocity of the winds approaching their property were grossly overestimating.
“But in the morning, it hit so fast,” says Lynn. “The house was shaking. I had to go outside and get some of the furniture and bring it in, which I’ve never done the whole time we’ve lived there, because the wind was so violent. I was afraid we were going to break a window.”
Lynn took her dog outside for a walk and to get a quick glimpse of the neighborhood. That’s when she first saw the fires. “I walked outside and I saw smoke, and it was far away. I mean, we’ve had little fires here and there, but nothing like this.” Now fearing the worst, Lynn rushed back inside and began preparing her family to evacuate. “My daughter, Londyn LaVoy, was sleeping, and her boyfriend had moved in with us,” she says, “So I went in their room and said, ‘Hey guys, you might wanna start getting up and think about getting a go-bag together, because there’s a fire on the horizon.’” LaVoy and her partner Andrew Cardenas initially dismissed Lynn’s suggestions, stating their plans to run errands instead. Luckily, Lynn followed her intuition and insisted upon their departure. “I said, ‘No, you’re gonna stay here, and we’re gonna figure out what’s going on with the fire.’ They weren’t too happy about that.”
By the time Lynn got everyone in gear and stepped back outside to check on things, she found the situation rapidly worsening. “Twenty minutes later, the fire had already jumped. I think at that point [the news anchors] had said it was, like, 200 acres, and it was just traveling at such a fast speed.” While commiserating with other neighbors also surveying the scene, Lynn learned that some planned to leave, while others vowed to stay behind and hose off the surrounding rooftops as much as feasibly possible. A few even offered to try to water down Lynn’s home, too, because as she puts it, “That’s what we all do as a community.” Still, gauging the scenario, Lynn decided it was time to go. She gathered her four rescue animals, including Fizzy, her Brussels Griffon, along with her three rabbits, Inky, Lola, and Bun Bunz, readied her family’s luggage, and then took a break to glance out front one last time and loaded up the two separate vehicles. “By the time I went back outside, because now I could smell smoke in the house, the fire had already reached our neighborhood. And so by that time, we were running—getting everything in the cars, getting everybody in, I put masks on everyone, I put towels over the animals in their little carriers, got in the car—and then Andrew’s truck wouldn’t start.”
Pressed for time with the flames hot on their heels, Lynn bravely put her feelings to the side and tried to get Andrew’s car running. “He’s panicking. We’ve got to go, and I’m jumping his truck with the fire down the street.” With the danger swiftly approaching, tensions were running high, and the smoke was growing thicker with each passing second. For a minute there, Lynn said, it was very touch and go, and it appeared as if they might not make it out in time. “Finally, his truck started, and we all went down to the Pacific Coast Highway [PCH],” said Lynn. “The cops had already barricaded the area, so they had forced you into the fire on the left. It was scary, because by then, smoke was billowing into the car. There was almost zero visibility. I was having a hard time breathing. I literally had to take my shirt off and stick it in the vents to clog them, because even though I turned my car off, I was still getting smoke. The rabbits are coughing, Fizzy’s coughing. I’m on speaker phone with Andrew and Londyn, they’re panicking, and it was just chaos at that point.”
With everyone escaping through the Palisades, the Highlands, and Sunset Mesa all at once, barricades created by police enforcement inadvertently caused a bottlenecking effect, resulting in a standstill on the highway while the fires followed in hot pursuit. “We started seeing people abandoning their cars, because the cops were telling them, ‘Get out of your cars and run to the ocean,’” says Lynn. “I thought, we’re not gonna do that. If we do that, we’re gonna die. We have health problems, I couldn’t breathe as it is. There’s no way I’m gonna be trapped on the beach with four animals and my daughter and Andrew. There’s just no way. So we just kept going. I said, if they stop us, and they tell us to get out of our cars, you just keep going. Like, just go. And that’s what we did, and we got out.”
Meanwhile, across the country, McDonnell was stuck on set on a gig in New York City and feeling helpless as the situation at home rapidly developed. “She kept telling me what’s going on, keeping me updated. We were checking in with each other. By the time they got to the PCH, I had just talked to her and she was panicking. She was getting out.” In an attempt to survey the damage, McDonnell tapped into his home security system. “I had my phone with our Ring camera stuff on. I said, you know, I’m just gonna take a look and see what’s going on. As soon as I clicked on the live video, our cars were engulfed in flames.”
Jolted into action, McDonnell knew he had to get back to California—and fast. “It-s pretty jaw-dropping to see that,” shares McDonnell. “It just hits you, like, is this happening in real life? Is this real? Or is this a nightmare?” Reeling from what he just witnessed, a stunned McDonnell made his way down and off of the crane he was currently occupying, turned to Deliver Me From Nowhere director Scott Cooper, and reported that he would have to leave the production at once. Cooper immediately agreed, and Disney booked McDonnell on the first flight out the following morning. “I remember flying over the ocean because the winds were still bad,” McDonnell says with a shudder. “It was the scariest flight back in.”
While Lynn hunkered down at an overpriced hotel in Venice, she sent Londyn and Andrew to stay with her mother in Morro Bay. McDonnell, finally reunited with his wife, felt momentary relief at the tangible reassurance of her well-being—but they had no idea whether or not their house was still standing. “We actually lost our house on the seventh, but we didn’t get confirmation that it was gone until the eighth, because that was when BJ hiked in there,” Lynn divulges. “All night long on the seventh, neither one of us slept.” With McDonnell still stranded in New York and Lynn awaiting his arrival in Venice over 2,000 miles away, the makeup artist treated her insomnia with a heavy dose of doomscrolling and checking every viable source for updates. They had anxiety, but they had hope. They didn’t know it was already way too late.
“After me and Adrienne reconnected and gathered our bearings, I had her take me as close as she could to Santa Monica, where I was going to walk into our neighborhood that morning,” says McDonnell. “And that’s what I did. I got a satchel out and I walked all the way, about five miles, to Sunset Mesa, our neighborhood. It was quite surreal walking down that way, because the further and deeper I got in, the more destruction and chaos there was. I mean, all of these homes were burned, and other people in the industry that I knew where their houses were, were gone. It left me feeling like, there’s probably no way our house is still there. When I got to our neighborhood, I could see the smoke still rising from the ground. There were firemen still trying to put out fires in these apartments, and everything was just decimated. I rounded the corner and I went up the hill, and I noticed all the houses on our side of the hill were already flattened and still had spot fires everywhere. And sure enough, when I got to our house, it was just a total loss. Everything was gone. The ground was still hot. There was this hot breeze still blowing Santa Ana winds, and it was just very strange to be standing in a place where all your memories were, and all that ash blowing around you.”
With a great amount of effort, McDonnell reached into his pocket, grabbed his phone, and called his wife to tell her the news. “You’re standing in what was left of your house,” he muses. “Being there, it was hard for me to call Adrienne and tell her what had happened. She was waiting for me the whole time, without knowing if we had a house, if we had half a house, what it was. And I gave her a call, and I just broke down.”
Lynn, who spent hours alone back at their car waiting for McDonnell to report his findings, tried to believe that perhaps their home had been spared. “I thought we would come back with maybe some smoke damage, but I really had no expectation that this was going to be the last time that I was going to see our house,” she reflects. “Otherwise, I absolutely would have grabbed things that were important to me. Like my grandfather’s shirt when he passed away that I have, it still smells like his cologne. I would have grabbed my dog’s ashes, our photo albums, things like that, but I didn’t because I just didn’t have time, and I needed to make sure that my family was safe, which was the top priority.”
McDonnell adds, “When you lose something like this, with all the memories and everything, it feels like you lost a loved one, because your house basically feels like a person. It’s the personality that we all put into it, and the memories that we’ve all shared and loved, and when something like that is completely gone, it’s like the death of a family member.”
Amongst the remains, Lynn and McDonnell found little more than a few items left behind. One happened to be a statue that had come to act as a token of their love. “When BJ first was able to be at the house, our gargoyle was still standing,” says Lynn. “That’s the first thing we bought as a couple when we moved into that house, because we love horror, and we saw it at Oasis Imports, which is down on the PCH in Topanga—and that place is gone, it got destroyed—but it was very symbolic of our resilience and struggle. We thought, ‘Okay, this is symbolic. It’s still standing, we can rebuild.’ When we were able to get back to our property to sift through some stuff, I went over to the gargoyle and touched it, and his wings just fell apart in my hands, and I lost it.”
Since the incident, Lynn and McDonnell have been rolling with the same punches as everyone else who has been displaced by the fires. From money-hungry landlords who exploit vulnerable citizens with illegal price gouging, to Lynn winding up in the hospital with a bout of ischemic colitis and an eye sealed shut by a burning ember, to going through the process of itemizing every single object in their home for insurance purposes (down to the number of Sharpies in a drawer), to roughing it on a cement floor in their temporary rental until they could furnish the space with a bed to sleep on, to paying the bills that continue to pile on during all of this madness—the fact is, the loss of their home is a kinetic thing, a living problem, and one which will need to be addressed and dealt with for years to come.
Still, some relief came in the form of friends and colleagues, as each of their respective guilds rose to the occasion and attempted to ease some of their discomfort. “Our unions really stepped it up,” says McDonnell. “The Cinematographers Guild and the Directors Guild, and even the Costumers Guild, set up a whole thing for people to come get clothes. Disney also did the same thing, they opened up their warehouse with clothes they had from shows and let us come in and pick out things that fit us, because everything we had was just gone.” McDonnell considers how it makes him feel “really proud to be a union member,” an honor that he does not take lightly. “The president of IATSE Local 600 called me, straight up, Baird B. Steptoe Sr., and he was like, ‘We’re gonna take care of you.’ They were great with me and Adrienne, and it’s just been really amazing to see the whole film community come together to help those like us.”
Lynn pointedly notes that even her spectacles that she lost in the fires were replaced by a company that she had previously worked with during a film shoot. “I lost my eyeglasses, and Image Optics, which works for the prop house, and supplies glasses to actors and stuff for movies, they hooked me up with my prescription, and it was so nice. Everybody has just really stepped up for us, and made us feel so loved in such a time of chaos.”
California carries with it the common misconception that every single person who resides within its borders is lousy with old money. The truth is that the industry, much like the state in which it resides, was built upon the backs of blue collar workers who sacrifice their personal lives, their well-being, and often, their sanity, all in the name of their career. Although Lynn finds the perception personally frustrating, especially when faced with so much loss, her kind heart empathizes with those who watch the aftermath of such destruction on the glow of their television sets, warm in the refuge of their living rooms, thousands of miles away.
“I think it’s easy to see these Hollywood houses, and see the parties, and the Oscars, and all these beautiful events, and become detached,” says Lynn. “When they see a person lost their house in the Palisades, they don’t have sympathy for them, because they go, ‘Whatever, you guys probably are sitting on money, it’s not much, just rebuild.’ And you know, they’re struggling, so they’re like, ‘Why should I feel bad for these people? They can have the money to rebuild.’ But you know, there’s a ton of different families with different financial aspects to their lives that are living in these neighborhoods. With our situation, we’re working really hard to be able to afford to stay there, in that neighborhood. The loss of our house has been devastating, because we’re just hourly workers. We don’t get residuals. We work paycheck to paycheck, and we don’t work nine-to-five jobs either. We’re working 12 to 16 hours a day, and we’re doing that for three to six months, and when that’s over, we jump on another job. We’re just ghosts in our own lives. We don’t even have time to do things for ourselves, because we’re so busy making movies so that other people can get the residuals, and all these kickbacks, and then we don’t see any of that, you know? We’re just the worker bees that make the movies what they are.”
If you’d like to help McDonnell and Lynn while they make their way through this difficult time, you can donate to their GoFundMe, set up by Lynn’s mother, which is listed below. Every dollar helps, and they truly cherish every soul that lends a hand. “We feel guilty, because we know that people are also going through their own struggles,” admits Lynn. “It’s a hard thing, to be vulnerable, to ask for help, when other people need the help, too. We’re just so overly appreciative.”
gofundme.com/f/adrienne-bj-need-our-help-now
Photographs by Adrienne Lynn & BJ McDonnell
