‘What If…?’ Writer A.C. Bradley Lost Her Home in the L.A. Fires. Now She Faces Her Own ‘What If…?’ Moments With Young Daughter
“Today is an okay day,” says A.C. Bradley.
That might seem like an overstatement from a woman who just lost her Altadena home and has only two suitcases to her name.But right now, her focus, literally and figuratively, is on her three-and-a-half year old daughter, Adelia.
Bradley is known in Hollywood circles as the head writer of Marvel Studios’ What If…? animated series for two of its three seasons, and for working on the company’s Ms. Marvel show. She’s speaking by phone with The Hollywood Reporter while standing in the guest house of fellow writer and friend Joe Henderson, who lives in Los Angeles’ Studio City neighborhood. It’s her home for the time being, and she knows she is lucky to have a place to stay.
Bradley watches from a distance as Henderson and his kids play with Adelia in the yard, giving her a moment to catch her breath amid the calamity. These days, she tries to take calls away from her daughter’s sight. Adelia doesn’t like it when her mom is on the phone. Phone calls bring bad news.
Talk of rebuilding her life, her house, her anything is taking a back seat to rebuilding a sense of security for her daughter.
“She got a Spider-Man book bag, and she fills it with her surviving toys and takes it everywhere with her,” Bradley says.
Bradley says Adelia has started having tantrums since the fires, demanding to go home now, to play with her old toys now, to have the house fixed fast, as if all it would take is a hammer and some nails and everything would be all right and back to normal.
Adding to her turmoil,Bradley blames herself. She tried to explain the fires to her daughter in ways she thought a three-year-old would understand, but she now second guesses her parenting moves. “This will be a trauma that will leave a mark on her if I’m not careful,” Bradley says.
Many fire victims who fled their homes were able to grab possessions before fleeing. But Bradley watched the horror unfold via texts and calls from neighbors while in a coastal resort in Vietnam, powerless to do anything thanks to distance and a 15-hour time difference.
In December, Bradley took what she calls her first real vacation in more than five years. Not a trip to see family on a holiday or a weekend getaway, no, this was going to be a real vacation. She and Adelia joined a group travelling to Southeast Asia. And near the end, one part of the group splintered to Cambodia for more exploring, while others returned home to the U.S.
In what would become one of her own What If…? moments, instead of going back home, Bradley used her Hilton Honors points to book a visit to the beach town of Mui Ne, deciding to stay a few extra days. It was Sunday evening, Jan. 5. Two days later, the fires broke out in the Pacific Palisades and her own community, Altadena.
When the fires began and the evacuations started, things weren’t that dire in her mind. Of course things would get under control. Of course things would go back to normal. But the situation got worse and worse. She jumped on the Watch Duty app to follow along for updates.
She learned her home was destroyed from a video from a neighbor. In grainy footage, it showed a house spared from the devastation but then as it panned across the street, there was a yard with nothing but a smoky rubble where a house should be. And then she saw a car, her car, untouched in the driveway. She watched it three times just to comprehend what it meant. It was around 7 a.m. Vietnam time, 4 p.m. Los Angeles time.
Before this, whenever she had contemplated losing a home in a fire, it was like a movie scene — walking through charred door frames, around blackened walls. Picking up a framed photo in the rubble, with a time-lapse that shows the photo now sitting on a clean shelf in a newly rebuilt house. It wasn’t like that at all.
“I started crying. That walls not being there got me. There was nothing left. I screamed,” says Bradley.
And she woke up her daughter.
The next two days were a blur of surreal moments. Bradley called her insurance company, she called her mom. But she was stuck in a land where no one around her spoke English, and those that did were only saying learned pleasantries such as “Have a nice day” and “How may I serve you today?” When she bawled by the poolside, “no one batted an eye,” she recalls.
A moment at the beach captured the absurdness and futility of her situation. Her daughter built a sandcastle, only to have a wave come in and wash part of it away. Adelia built the castle up again, only to have another wave roll in and wash it away. The scene repeated over and over.
“She’s laughing, and I’m just…trying not to cry,” Bradley recalls.
That night, she sat Adelia down and tried as best as she could to tell her child what happened. “I explained that our house was hurt and that we’re okay, she’s okay, Alexi, our cat, is okay. I told her our house is hurt, but it will get better.”
Bradley bought her house in 2019. It was a fixer-upper, built in 1942. She had an HVAC system installed. She painted it herself; her kitchen was green, her bedroom, yellow, her daughter’s room, purple. Last year, she ripped up the front yard, shoveling mulch from a pile that was taller than her daughter, and planted native plants. She was going to redo the bathroom next.
“I loved my house,” she says.
Bradley still hasn’t been at the house but has been obsessively looking over footage and videos. She mourns her losses: a credenza, which she drove across town to pick up from the offices of Will Ferrell’s production company Gary Sanchez after it shuttered; concept art from What If…?; posters of shows she worked on; an Emmy statuette for her work on animated series Trollhunters: Tales from Arcadia. The one that hurts the most is a bucket hat that once belonged to a cousin she was especially close to, who died at a young age.
“That is one thing I want back,” she says, an anger rising from within. “I had to deal with loss then, and now it feels like I’m losing him all over again.” Her voice shakes as emotion overtakes her.
And she marvels at the odd and random items that survived. A running stroller sits inexplicably in the front yard. The backyard gazebo is gone, the compost bin is gone, the Wayfair patio set is gone — but one wooden chair remains, according to the photos she’s looked at over and over again.
“That one chair…it’s just sitting there,” she guffaws in amazement. “I want that as my lucky chair.”
Her car remains right where she left it when she went on vacation, in the driveway. The wheels have melted, but the rest of it looks fine to her. She wonders if the Marvel hoodie she left in the back seat is still wearable.
All of Bradley’s possessions now can be distilled in the number suitcases she packed for her trip. But she remains philosophical about it, even in her mourning.
“It makes you cry, and it makes you sad,” she admits. “But memories matter because of the people in them, not the stuff in them. The stuff just reminds us of the people.”
Her voice wavers and she takes a breath and adds, “That’s what I tell my daughter.”
