In one widely circulated video from the L.A. wildfires, Harrison Ford sits inside a police vehicle in blue jeans, looking distressed. What’s striking about the video — among the many more dramatic scenes of leveled neighborhoods and smoke-filled skies — is Ford’s vulnerability. The man known for playing big-screen heroes who can get out of a jam with little more than a well-timed smirk had been evacuated from his Brentwood neighborhood, just as more than 100,000 other Angelenos would be from theirs, and was dependent upon first responders for his safety.

The sight of affluent public figures — even Indiana Jones himself — grappling with the potential loss of their homes is a striking new image in the growing category of climate refugees. Climate refugees are people forced to relocate as a result of the effects of climate change, and by 2050, there will be 1.2 billion of them, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace. Today, climate refugees are likely to be, say, families living in makeshift tents in Bangladesh uprooted by rising ocean waters or sheep herders in drought-addled Syria looking for a new place to graze their starving flocks.

“Our picture of any type of refugee is normally someone very poor and very desperate,” says Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World. “People who have money can generally protect themselves from many of life’s difficulties. But what we’re seeing in Los Angeles right now is something different — wealthy climate refugees.”

Steve Guttenberg stayed behind and helped neighbors evacuate during the Palisades Fire.

Screengrab/YouTube

Some of the images of evacuated celebrities have been wholesome, like Police Academy star Steve Guttenberg, initially unrecognized by a local TV reporter, frantically trying to move cars abandoned on a Pacific Palisades street so fire trucks could pass through, or Jennifer Garner, in a hoodie and baseball cap, handing out food to first responders and evacuees in Altadena. Others border on amusing, like Dennis Quaid, mid-evacuation, trying to cram a hamper of his teenage daughter’s clothes into his Mercedes. And some have been downright cringey, like Chrissy Teigen sharing a picture of herself crying in a cavernous walk-in closet in the $18 million home she shares with John Legend.

“God bless everyone — we’re all in trauma,” says filmmaker Adam McKay. The director, who lives in Hancock Park, did not have to evacuate, but as one of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken voices warning about climate change, he was talking with industry friends as the fires raged across the city. “Most people in Hollywood are like, ‘Yeah, climate change is real, but it’s far away,’ ” says McKay, whose 2021 Netflix movie Don’t Look Up satirized celebrity and media indifference to pending environmental catastrophe. “I’ve had like five people this past week tell me, ‘I didn’t know it was coming this soon.’ ”

The emergence of celebrity climate refugees, who have resources to rebuild that dwarf those of other victims of disasters, has brought out the inevitable “let Hollywood burn” commenters on social media. But these pictures have also inspired a fair amount of empathy. When reality TV stars Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt shared on TikTok that they had lost their Palisades home and been dropped by their home insurer, fans helped send Montag’s 2010 album Superficial to the top of the iTunes charts.

For scientists who have been warning for years that climate change driven by humans’ burning of coal, oil and natural gas would lead to these kinds of disasters, the widely shared images of celebrities losing their lavish L.A. homes is not surprising. But this moment does represent a chance, they say, to make a more lasting impact than sending an album to No. 1.

“Positions on climate change are so politically polarized,” says Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. “There’s a blue narrative and a red narrative. It may be that as celebrities speak about their personal experiences, it will reach people who haven’t been reached before. This is a major city in a wealthy state with highly professional first responders. But even in L.A., the system wasn’t able to keep up.”

Many stars have made large donations to wildfire relief funds, including Beyoncé ($2.5 million), Leonardo DiCaprio ($1 million) and Jamie Lee Curtis ($1 million). Adam Umhoefer, an executive at the CAA Foundation who leads the agency’s climate and sustainability initiatives, is heartened by the giving — and CAA has launched a relief fund of its own (see page 55). But Umhoefer also wants Hollywood to know the potential of their platforms. “People come to understand climate change through storytelling, and we are storytellers,” he says. “It will be interesting to see if this moment produces a few more Adam McKays.”

That had already happened for some victims of previous wildfires. Real Time With Bill Maher writer-producer Chris Kelly, who lost his home in Malibu during the 2018 Woolsey blaze, found that disaster to be an aha moment. “When we were evacuated, suddenly everything we had accumulated in our lives fit in a car,” Kelly says. “Now we’re witnessing thousands of people have that experience. It’s a moment that could cause them to think, ‘Oh, that thing I saw on the news is true. That 1.5 degree of separation is real, and this is how it happens.’ ” (Scientists consider a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures over preindustrial times as a critical limit beyond which the risks of extreme weather events and sea level rise significantly increase.)

The entertainment industry’s creativity in telling apocalyptic stories has typically missed an element the L.A. wildfires have made more vivid, scientists say, which is the importance of human cooperation across communities. “Hollywood uses stories to depict disasters, and almost entirely those problems are solved through superheroes,” Vince says. “We actually can’t do anything alone. You can’t call Batman. There isn’t a way out of this except through ourselves.” 

Chris Gardner contributed to this report.

This story first appeared in the Jan. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.