Yahoo Lifestyle "I Ain't Buying What Hollywood Is Selling": 18 Famous People Who Ditched LA And Why
As the heart of the American entertainment industry, Los Angeles is quite a bustling place. Plenty of aspiring performers move there with dreams of making it big, but once they've "made it," many of them relocate somewhere quieter.
Here are 18 celebs who ditched LA for somewhere much more peaceful:
1.In 2024, Glen Powell moved back home to Texas to be near his family and finish his degree. He told GQ that the benefit of "getting to this point in Hollywood is that [he] can now leave Hollywood."
He said, "It's like I've earned the ability to go back to my family."
2.Rachel McAdams reportedly lives in the Southern US with her partner Jamie Linden and their two children. Taking breaks from acting "really helped [her] feel empowered."
In 2023, she told Bustle, "It helped me feel like I was taking back some control. And I think it sort of allowed me to come in from a different doorway."
3.Lily Collins and her husband Charlie McDowell moved to Copenhagen, Denmark in 2023.
Denmark is meanigful to them because they honeymooned there in 2021. They also co-own the media production and real estate company Case Study Copenhagen.
Lily is also a fan of the capital city's fashion.
She told Vogue Scandanavia, "Everyone here is so cool, so chic."
4.Since 2014, Chris Evans has largely lived in his home state of Massachusetts. In 2023, he told GQ that, when he's at his residence outside Boston, he can "really take [he's] time."
He said, "[Returning to Massachusetts] takes me back to a place when life was not just simpler — that's too reductive — but to a time where I was more pure, I guess; where my ego and my insecurities weren't such a dominant force that I had to push against."
In 2023, Chris and his wife Alba Baptista reportedly got married in Cape Cod.
5.Amanda Seyfried's main residence is a farm in the Catskills in New York. In 2020, she told the New York Times, "It’s insane how much I can feel so accomplished and successful here without having to be in a successful movie."
She lives there with her husband Thomas Sadoski and their two kids. They also have goats, horses, chickens, and Gus the donkey.
Part of the reason Amanda started looking for a home outside of Hollywood at age 22 was a poor experience she had on a film set.
She said, "I have been put in very insane positions. I was walking around with no underpants on and a T-shirt, and I didn't want to be, yet I didn't feel like I had any power to say, 'No, this makes me uncomfortable.'"
She purchased her farm in 2013.
6.After wrapping How I Met Your Mother, Jason Segel moved from LA to a small stone house in an orange grove in Ojai, California. He first moved there while preparing for The End of the Tour because he asked himself, "What would Edward Norton do?" then decided the answer was to "move to the middle of nowhere so you can get out of your own head."
In 2023, he told the LA Times, "Being there had the really interesting side-effect of realizing — after six weeks time, mind you — that, 'Oh, my gosh. I finally feel calm.' And it occurred to me that when you're doing this job and living in LA, you're never leaving campus.
So it was like this whole new experience to realize that when someone outside of Hollywood asks, 'What are you up to?' they mean, like, right now. So the answer is: 'Oh. I'm on my way to the grocery store,' not 'I have three projects in development.'"
7.Eric Stonestreet has "been living in Kansas City since Modern Family ended, basically."
In 2024, he told In Depth with Graham Bensinger, "What I realized it does is, it highlights everything great about our business — the entertainment business — and it highlights all the douchebaggery of our business. It amplifies it because I'm here, I'm dealing with people from here, and I'm going into the store and having all these authentic, real moments, and then I go to Hollywood, and it's, you know, you're reminded of some of the types of people that you deal with.
But then, you're also offered fruit on a big board. 'Would you like some lychee and kiwi, sir?' It's like, 'Oh yeah, this is what's great about Hollywood.' It's like, nobody's offered me a fruit board over at Jolly Ridge..."
He said that returning to Hollywood periodically is "more fun" than living there was.
8.James Van Der Beek, his wife Kimberly Van Der Beek, and their five (now six) kids moved to Texas in 2020 after a personally difficult year for all of them.
On Instagram, he shared, "In the last ten months, we've had two late-term pregnancy losses, each of which put [Kimberly] in the hospital, we spent Christmas break thinking she had a tumor (the doctor was wrong, thank god), I was prematurely booted off a reality dancing show I was favored to win in front of the whole world, and my mom died. And a shut-down. All of that led to some drastic changes in our lives, and dreams, and priorities... and landed us here. Overflowing with profound gratitude today."
In 2023, he told Good Morning America that he'd spent the past few years working on the ranch, making food with what they've grown in their garden, and trying "some attempts at carpentry."
He said, "Living in Texas, I've been offered basically everything that I thought I really wanted before, and I just haven't had it in me to say yes, to leave where we're at. But I think it's time. My big thing is that my kids come with me, so we'll all go wherever we're going and figure it out.
This break has been really, really good for me. I think I've probably figured out a lot more of who I am and what's important in these last couple of years."
9.During COVID-19, Jesse Eisenberg, his wife Anna Stout, and their son relocated to Bloomington, Indiana so that he and Anna could help fundraise and volunteer for the domestic violence shelter her mother ran for 35 years. They made the move in a 10-day RV road trip.
He told Indianapolis Monthly, "[It] is not just a domestic violence shelter — it provides transitional housing and legal counseling, and they work with victims of sex trafficking. It’s an incredible place, but due to COVID-19, they lost a lot of student volunteers. So my wife and I came here in March, and I’ve been volunteering there about four days a week. I’m doing painting, cleaning, and maintenance.
...It's been one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had. Being involved in something with a direct benefit to people who are vulnerable has been really fulfilling. So I go there as much as possible. I was there until 1 a.m. the other night, waxing a floor for somebody who was moving in. This has been a very unusual period of my life. I think for a lot of people, the pandemic has kind of thrown off whatever their routine was. For me, that has been a good thing."
10.Debby Ryan and her husband Josh Dun moved to his home state of Ohio in 2021. While they were spending the holidays with his family a few years prior, she told him, "Let's move to Columbus." A new listing happened to pop up on his real estate apps after a long period of unsuccessful househunting, so they extended their trip to view it.
Debby told Architectural Digest, "To be among the trees was really inspiring. This [house's] treehouse theme informed a lot of the design sensibility. We wanted to soften the lines of the house with organic shapes, textures, and materials. We gravitated toward a lot of green — that’s how the tree house became a tree home."
11.In 2014, Matthew McConaughey and his wife Camila Alves McConaughey moved to his home state of Texas to be there for his mom and brothers amid a family crisis. Camila noticed Texas had a different "gravity" on Matthew, and one day, when he was driving back from visiting his mom with "a peaceful but confident, energetic" expression, she said, "You want to move here, don't you?"
After he told her he did want to move back, she said, "Let's do it."
The adjustment was more challenging for Camila, who grew up in Brazil. However, she has found comfort in the similarities between the cultures.
In 2024, she told Southern Living, "We grew up saying 'Yes, ma'am' and 'No, sir' or — as I should say — 'Yes, ma'am' and 'Yes, sir.' It takes me right back to how I was raised...In Texas, we were going to the church that we like to attend every Sunday. Sports became a stronger tradition for the kids."
Matthew said, "Time slowed down. The clock was right, the body clock. And part of that is ritual; part of that is just the distance between places and the way people move. But it's also the hospitality, the courtesy, the common sense, the lack of drama."
12.Linsdsay Lohan reportedly moved to Dubai because paparazzi are illegal there.
She moved to the UAE in 2014, and she's now married and raising her son there.
In 2024, she told Flaunt, "It's still a city. So it's pretty similar. I mean, I do anything that anyone else does in their daily life. I'm up with my son in the mornings, I do breakfast with him, go to my pilates, come home for lunch, and go to the park, the same things that any normal mom would do in their daily life. Or you would do in LA. I think the only difference is the time zone shift. There's a big disconnect between when work starts for me and other places. I can do my work calls with New York at like three or four, around this time, and then LA picks up later."
13.Hilarie Burton Morgan and her husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan initially lived between LA and NYC. However, they both always wanted to live on a farm — a shared dream they discussed on their second date. So, after the birth of their first child, they relocated to a working farm called Mischief Farm in Rhinebeck, New York.
Their menagerie includes alpacas, Highland cows, ducks, chickens, donkeys, and and an emu.
Hilarie wrote a memoir, The Rural Diaries, about her life on Mischief Farm.
They also ended up co-owning the local candy store, Samuel's Sweet Shop, with Paul Rudd and Julie Yaeger.
14.After John Goodman met his wife Anna Beth Goodman, he'd "kind of had it with show business and [he] wanted to get away from Los Angeles." So, they ended up moving to New Orleans.
In 2014, he told Garden & Gun, "The options were St. Louis or New Orleans. We got as far as buying land in St. Louis. But Anna Beth started designing a house that got to be the size of Buckingham Palace, and I said, 'This ain't gonna work out.' So we chucked it and bought a haunted house [in Old Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans] instead."
15.Adrian Grenier made a permanent move to Austin four years after buying property there. He left because he "reached the apex of that promise – if you work hard, you become famous, then you make a lot of money…but it was lackluster at the top." Soon after, he relocated 45 minutes away to Bastrop and started a farm.
He told Austin Lifestyle, "I had friends here, I ran a business here and liked the pace. Austin is cosmopolitan without being snooty; it's earthy. People are smart and successful, but they don't flaunt it. There is nothing to prove, people accept you and it felt good right away. Plus, the great food, like Nixta Taqueria and ATX FOOD CO. Tacos three times a day.. And the weather – I'd had enough of brutal winters."
16.Nikki Reed and her husband Ian Somerhalder relocated a short distance from LA to a farm in Santa Barbara because she "really did not want to be in the public eye anymore."
She told Santa Barbara Magazine, "If I could like tell you my dream, it would be to achieve total food autonomy, to have zero connection to a supermarket, to city water, to anything like that—to be able to live without relying on any system. So, you know, we're not too far off from that."
17.After living between the US and the UK, Josh Harnett and his wife Tamsin Egerton spent lockdown in her home country. When they were expecting their third child, they opted to permanently call Hampshire home.
In 2024, Josh told the Guardian that, in LA and NYC, "people only want to talk about your career," but in their village, "nobody cares."
Because he's in the UK on a marriage visa, he's only allowed to leave for work for 180 days each year. Basically, he can only shoot one movie a year, which is perfectly alright for him because he gets to spend more time with his children.
However, this isn't the first time Josh move out of LA. In the early '00s, when he was on his way towards become a major Hollywood star, he went home to Minnesota and went his separate ways with his agents. After a year and a half break, he returned to doing smaller projects.
He said, "People’s attention to me at the time was borderline unhealthy. Well, look, I don’t want to give this a lot of weight. There were incidents. People showed up at my house. People that were stalking me. A guy showed up at one of my premieres with a gun, claiming to be my father. He ended up in prison. There were lots of things. It was a weird time. And I wasn’t going to be grist for the mill.”
18.And finally, Jeff Daniels moved back to his hometown of Chelsea, Michigan in 1986. In 2017, he told The Off Camera Show, "I never bought whatever you had to do in LA to sustain a movie career, which included going to parties and introducing yourself to producers, going to other people's premieres just to be seen. I could not do that, would not do that."
He continued, "I honestly didn't think the career would last. I was a fatalist, and part of it was, when you're from the Midwest, you have a really good bullshit detector. There's not a simplicity to them, but there's an honesty — 'Why don't you get to the point? Quit trying to impress me.' So that was entrenched in me.
Add to New York, ten years off-Broadway, when we are not actors, we are artists, and LA and movies are bupkis, I was told. And that's artistically where I grew up. So, I ain't buying what Hollywood is selling. So I just wanna be known as a really good actor. I'm a hired gun. One of the reasons was a deathly fear of that kind of Hollywood success. People crash and burn."
He also said that, in his mind, the "worst care scenario" was losing his wife and family.
He's been married to his childhood sweetheart, Kathleen Treado, since 1979. They have three children.
What's the most peaceful place you've ever lived (or dreamed of living)? Let us know in the comments!
