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.”
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.”
3.
Lily Collins and her husband Charlie McDowell moved to Copenhagen, Denmark in 2023.
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.”
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.”
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.”
7.
Eric Stonestreet has “been living in Kansas City since Modern Family ended, basically.”
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.
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.
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.
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?”
12.
Linsdsay Lohan reportedly moved to Dubai because paparazzi are illegal there.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
What’s the most peaceful place you’ve ever lived (or dreamed of living)? Let us know in the comments!
