Actor Jason Segel recently spoke to why he moved out of Los Angeles to a small town and noted how much better it was for his mental health and personal growth to have done so.
Appearing on the Today show, the How I Met Your Mother star talked about he decided to leave Los Angeles behind after the TV series came to its end in 2014. And now he says it was the best thing he has ever done.
Segel explained to host Hoda Kotb that his career was on the fast track when he was in his 20s. He had a hit TV show and he was also writing successful movie scripts, including the 2008 film Forgetting Sarah Marshall and 2011’s The Muppets.
“I was having a really roaring twenties,” Segel said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I had How I Met Your Mother and I was also writing a bunch of movies that were successful and doing well.”
But with his career on the move, Segel came to the realization that living in L.A. left him neglecting his own mental health. He said he wasn’t “doing a lot of personal check-ins.”
““I realized that art is supposed to be a reflection of what you’re going through and I actually wasn’t going through much life-wise,” he continued.
That is when the Shrinking star decided to leave L.A. to attain a sense of peace in his life.
“I moved out of L.A.,” Segel explained. “I moved to a little country town and I started to ask myself questions like, ‘What do you actually like? What are you actually thinking about right now? Who do you want to be as a performer and an artist?’”
Segel eventually moved to Ojai, California, a small town in Ventura County where he is satisfied with living a more authentic life.
“Being there had the really interesting side-effect of realizing — after six weeks’ time, mind you — that, ‘Oh, my gosh. I finally feel calm,’” he said. “And it occurred to me that when you’re doing this job and living in L.A., 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,’” the now 44-year-old star concluded.
Segel is far from the only member of the Hollywood elite who has abandoned Los Angeles.
The trend has been clear for years as celebrities have opted to leave L.A., and many even left California altogether.
Entertainers including Mark Wallberg, Sylvester Stallone, Rod Stewart, Sheryl Crow, Dean Cain, Robert Davi, Nikki Sixx, Rob Schneider, Scott Baio, and Sean Patrick Flanery left years ago.
This year, Ryan Gosling and his wife Eva Mendes were the latest to leave L.A. for a quieter, more sane home in the U.K.
Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco also joined the exodus and purchased a ranch in Thousand Oaks, California.
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