The bright lights of Hollywood are like a beacon to dreamers all over the world. Every year, more and more people relocate to Los Angeles in hopes of making it big in the entertainment industry. Plenty of successful performers put down roots in the city, but sometimes, they decide to pursue a more peaceful life somewhere far away.
Here are 27 celebs who moved out of LA (and why):
1.
Ariel Winter and her boyfriend, Luke Benward, moved out of Los Angeles after Modern Family finished filming its final season in 2020. She told People, “I didn’t leave the industry. I just left the city of LA. It holds some not-great memories for me, and I’m young and never lived anywhere else, and thought, ‘Why not?’ If you’re no longer on a network show that shoots there, you don’t really have to be there, and if I get a network show, I can easily go back.”
She also told the podcast Quitters, “Part of the reason I always hated LA is because I have been followed by paparazzi for a very long portion of my life. And I really, really dislike having my space invaded. I don’t like feeling watched. I’ve always just wanted to live a very, very normal life, just have a normal existence.”
Ariel reportedly bought a house in College Grove, Tennessee, which is about 34 miles from Nashville. Luke grew up nearby in Franklin.
2.
The year after her divorce from Brandon Blackstock, Kelly Clarkson packed her bags for New York City, taking The Kelly Clarkson Show with her. She told USA Today, “I’ll be real honest: I thought I was making a horrible decision. I knew I needed a fresh start and couldn’t be in LA. I really wanted to be in Montana, but you can’t really do a show from there quite yet. So I was like, ‘The only other option would probably be New York.'”
Having lived in the city for several weeks, she had no regrets, adding, “I genuinely love it, and I love that my kids love it.”
3.
In 2024, Eva Longoria told Marie Claire that she and her family have been splitting their time between Spain [where she often works] and Mexico [where her husband, José Bastón, is from] for the last few years. She said, “I had my whole adult life here [in LA]. But even before [the pandemic], it was changing. The vibe was different. And then COVID happened, and it pushed it over the edge. Whether it’s the homelessness or the taxes, not that I want to shit on California — it just feels like this chapter in my life is done now…I’m privileged. I get to escape and go somewhere. Most Americans aren’t so lucky. They’re going to be stuck in this dystopian country, and my anxiety and sadness is for them.”
Her comments led to online speculation that she’d moved out of the US because of the 2024 election. So, to set the record straight, Eva called into her friend Ana Navarro’s podcast The View: Behind the Table. She asked Ana, “Will you please let them know I didn’t move out of Spain, I mean the United States, because of Trump?”
Then, Eva added, “I’ve been in Europe working for almost three years. By the way, the article says that. People just grabbed some clickbait stuff to be divisive, which makes me so sad, you know. Everything you say is just meant to be divisive when we can’t be that way right now…I didn’t leave because of the political environment. I left because my work took me there.”
4.
In the Season 2 premiere episode of The Family Stallone, Sylvester Stallone told his three daughters, “After long, hard consideration, your mother [Jennifer Flavin] and I have decided, time to move on and leave the state of California permanently, and we’re going to Florida.” In a confessional, he added, “We have a lot of roots in California, so it’s not an easy transition to Florida. But, Jennifer really had her heart set on it. I gave in.”
5.
Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling reportedly relocated to Santa Barbara, a little under two hours from LA. An insider told People, “For them, the most important job is their girls. Everything else comes second. And their girls are thriving. They left LA to live a bit further north, away from Hollywood. They didn’t want the girls to grow up around other celebrity kids. Eva and Ryan love their life. It’s admirable how they’ve been able to create balance and boundaries. They care so much about their marriage and just want their girls to live a happy life.”
6.
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.”
7.
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.
Jesse 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…”
He continued, “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.”
8.
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.”
He also told IndieWire, “I’m not going to be sitting in a class with other students on the regular. I’m basically going to be coming back because I have to finish up, but I’m going to be shooting The Running Man in the fall. So I’m going to be in London, but I am going to be going back for proctored exams. So, they’re letting me figure it out [with] distance learning. And I’m obviously going to be coming in, Zooming in for classes and whatnot, but I have to be back for the proctored exams. So, we’re figuring that out for two or three times a semester, I’ll come back for all my stuff. Edgar [Wright, the director] has been very nice about letting me finish my degree in the middle of his massive movie.”
9.
Lily Collins and her husband Charlie McDowell moved to Copenhagen, Denmark in 2023. Denmark is meaningful to them because they honeymooned there in 2021. They also co-own the media production and real estate company Case Study Copenhagen. Lily told Elle Denmark, “Life here is just so wonderful and so calm and bright. And what I love so much is that there’s so much color and, yet, it’s so calm. I love being able to bike everywhere. And it feels like a big city but also very intimate, and everyone is so nice.”
10.
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 [his] 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.”
11.
In 2014, Matthew McConaughey and 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.
Josh Duhamel bought a piece of land in Minnesota and spent 15 years working on it until moving his family there full-time. He told Parade, “Part of the reason I built my place out in Minnesota, deep in the woods, is it’s removed from everything. The closest store is 40 miles away. Once we get there, it’s really about everybody taking care of each other — making memories, spending time with family and friends. You really get a chance to get back to the basics. You’re not consumed by all these other distractions. When you’re out there, it’s really about having fun, making sure everybody’s warm, everybody’s got food and water.”
He continued, “I’ve become a lot closer to my own parents because of this place, which has been interesting. My dad absolutely loves coming out there to hang out. And we’ve spent more time together in these last five, 10 years than we ever did growing up. I’m much closer to my dad. My mom now loves coming out there. It’s become a real, central hub for all of us…”
“My son is going to have memories of this place forever. He’s not on his iPad when he’s out there. He’s out there in the boat with me, or he’s playing soccer on the beach, or he’s out there in the woods doing whatever I’m doing. And then I have a little baby who’s going to experience the same thing. Someday, I hope to pass this on to them [so] they’re able to share it with their kids. It’s really important to me that they have this. It’s not just about having all the amenities and all the luxuries that we become so used to. It’s really about family. It’s about legacy,” Josh said.
13.
Nikki Reed and 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.”
14.
Michael Sheen moved back home to Port Talbot, Wales, in 2018. He first began considering relocation seven years prior when he played Jesus in a local three-day-long theatrical performance of the Passion alongside residents who were dealing with the increasing cost of living and job losses.
He told the Sunday Times, “Once you become aware of difficulties in the area you come from, you don’t have to do anything. You can live somewhere else, visit family at Christmas, and turn a blind eye to injustice. It doesn’t make you a bad person, but I’d seen something I couldn’t unsee. I had to apply myself, and I might not have the impact I’d like, but the one thing that I can say is that I’m doing stuff. I know I am — I’m paying for it!”
15.
After wrapping How I Met Your Mother, Jason Segel moved to a small stone house in an orange grove in Ojai, California, which is a little under two hours from LA. He first moved there while preparing for The End of the Tour because he asked himself, “What would Edward Norton do?”. Then, he 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.'”
16.
In 2025, actor Shaun Majumder moved back to Canada with his family. Rather than return home to Newfoundland, they settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He told CBC, “Have you been watching the news? Have you seen what’s going on? I ran out of a burning building with my youngsters under my arm and my wife on my back. I’m like, ‘Get me out of here, this is crazy!’ You know, we’ve been kind of, like, mulling over a big change over the last six to eight months, to be honest. Having two young kids, living in Los Angeles, is a really different experience than moving down there as a super enthusiastic whippersnapper actor. But, you know, during COVID, we had two children, and that changed our lives forever. We actually went back to Newfoundland; it’s kind of where we hunkered down. It just feels like the perfect storm.”
He also said, “We also knew that the tides were turning on the political landscape in America. We knew an election was coming up, and I said to my wife, ‘Shelby, if Trump wins, I don’t know. I have a feeling that that’s going to be the kicker to get me to go. I think I need to go.’ We went through the election. We went to our family’s place in Florida for Christmas. We came back to LA. The city was on fire. Trump was now president, whether you like him or not. The country was kind of becoming more chaotic. And we were just like, oh, yeah, if the universe wasn’t screaming at us right now to get out of here, then this is definitely a kicker. And I do most of my work in Canada, so it just makes sense for us to be up here.”
17.
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.”
18.
Lindsay 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.”
And in 2025, she told Elle, “It’s hard in LA. Even taking my son to the park in LA, I get stressed. I’m like, ‘Are there cameras?’ In New York, there’s no worry; no one bothers us. Everyone has their own thing going on. There’s a different kind of energy in New York. I’d rather have downtime in New York than I would in LA. But the nice thing about LA is, I like space [and you get that here]. But I’m thinking as I’m saying this, the funny thing is, in Dubai, I get all of those things. I get the privacy, I get the peace, I get the space. I don’t have to worry there; I feel safe… We’re based there, but last year, we were there less than half the year. I want to spend more time there. It is nice to have a balance. But my husband and I are always like, ‘Okay, we have until he’s five.'”
19.
Amanda Seyfried’s main residence is a farm in the Catskills in New York. She lives there with her husband, Thomas Sadoski, and their two kids. They also have goats, horses, chickens, and Gus the donkey. 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.”
Amanda purchased her farm in 2013. Part of the reason she 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.'”
20.
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.”
Jeff, who’s been married to his childhood sweetheart, Kathleen Treado, since 1979, also said that, in his mind, the “worst care scenario” was losing his wife and family.
21.
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.
22.
Debby Ryan and 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.”
23.
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.”
24.
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.”
25.
After living between the US and the UK, Josh Harnett and 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 Josh is 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 has moved out of LA. In the early ’00s, when he was on his way towards becoming 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.”
26.
Hilarie Burton Morgan and 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 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.
27.
And finally, after living in Hollywood for 20 years, comedian Tom Green moved home to Ontario, Canada, where he lives on a 150-acre farm, in 2021. He told the New York Times, “I’m not really a Hollywood guy. I started to feel like I wasn’t being true to my authentic self.”
