Ricki Lake Joins Big Rock Burning Doc After Losing Malibu Home: 'It's Unthinkable'

The actress and filmmaker has boarded Big Rock Burning as an executive producer -- the documentary captures both the destruction of the 2025 blaze and the community's resilience in the aftermath.

"We had had equipment in place that we had gotten. We were trained to use this equipment, and we had the fire hoses, everything was deployed and ready to go, and we were hosing down both our property and my neighbor's next door, and their property survived. Their house survived and ours didn't," Lake told Deadline.

She recalled fleeing late into the night as flames closed in: "We left late in the evening with flames coming to our street… We all were fighting for ourselves, for our property and our lives because firetrucks didn’t come up Big Rock, and they didn't come up my street. And it's devastating for all of us, for us as a community. There's the generational families that lost the homes that they were raised in, and they were raising their grandchildren in. Just the level of devastation, it's unthinkable."

Lake and her husband, Ross Burningham, ultimately lost nearly everything inside their home, including priceless keepsakes from her breakout role.

"I lost all my memorabilia from Hairspray, my first film. My script that was signed by every cast member, including Divine, I had it for 38 years. It's gone," she shared. "My outfits [from Hairspray], my photo albums, my grandparents’ photo albums, my children's, my artwork, you name it, we lost it… We weren't planning to leave. We were planning to stay to fight the fire. We didn't pack; we didn't plan ahead. Looking back on it, that's what really kind of makes me kick myself and makes me really upset because we could have taken truckloads, we could have gotten tons of stuff out, but we didn't know how dangerous it was. We didn't know."

Despite her personal loss, Lake said she doesn't want sympathy but rather accountability and awareness.

"I don't want people to feel sorry for me… This film is really shedding light on so many people’s stories that didn't have as good an outcome as we have. But I really am honored to join forces with this beautiful group of people that are sharing a really important story," she explained.

"I'm really, really hopeful that this film is going to shed some light and raise awareness and that none of us are really protected by this city -- this city that we pay so much in taxes to," Lake added. "It's shocking to think that the infrastructure was not there to protect us that day, even though they had the warnings. I don't know who to blame. I'm not one to point fingers, I just know we were all let down."

After the fire, Lake and her husband relocated to New York but have since made the decision to rebuild on their land in Malibu.

"I am determined, and I will be back," she declared. "I'm 56. I'm going to be 57 soon. I want to be back on my land having my 60th birthday party. That is my hope. I have a little more than three years to make that happen. So, we'll see. I think it's a realistic goal."

Big Rock Burning will hold an exclusive preview screening at Malibu City Hall on Friday, hosted by the Malibu Film Society and the City of Malibu, before beginning its run at the Laemmle in Santa Monica September 12-18.