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Danica McKellar, who moved to Tennessee three years ago, is noting that more and more people in the entertainment industry are leaving Los Angeles.
The former “Wonder Years” star said when her stepson graduated from high school, she and her husband decided they wanted to get out of California, where she had lived for 40 years.
“I don’t know, California and Los Angeles didn’t feel like it used to for us, and I wanted to be closer to Draco so he didn’t have to be flying so far, and so I liked Tennessee,” she told Christine Taylor and David Lascher on their “Hey Dude… The 90s Called!” podcast.
McKellar’s 15-year-old son, Draco, had been flying between Los Angeles and Florida where his father, McKellar’s ex-husband Mike Verta, lives.
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Danica McKellar moved to Tennessee three years ago. (Paul Archuleta/Getty Images)
She said she and her husband, attorney Scott Sveslosky, didn’t want to move to Florida, but they wanted to be closer so it wouldn’t be such a long distance for her son to travel.
“We came to Tennessee and loved it, found this great house and, yeah, were ready for a change. I lived in Los Angeles for 40 years,” McKellar explained.
She added that they “wanted more nature. We wanted to be surrounded by more green.”
Lascher said that he often thinks about where he and his wife would move once his son graduates from high school.
“I have a lot of friends that moved, you know, Melissa [Joan Hart] has been in Tennessee for a long time, my good friend [screenwriter and director] Doug Ellin just all of a sudden up and moved to Nashville, I mean, a lot of people from L.A.,” he said.
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Danica McKellar noted that Jason Priestley is another actor who’s moved to Tennessee in recent years. (Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
McKellar pointed to former “Beverly Hills, 90210” star Jason Priestley as another famous friend who now lives in Tennessee.
“A lot of people live out here now,” she said, “‘cause we also learned during COVID that you don’t really have to be in one particular place for jobs.”
Priestley told E! News last year that he and his family “love it” in Nashville, where life is “so much easier to navigate.”
McKellar said that her husband still has a law firm based out of Los Angeles, but he only flies to the West Coast a couple of times a month because he can do the rest of his work remotely.
Lascher added that he met up with Scott Wolf last week in Park City, Utah, where the former “Party of Five” star is raising his kids.
Scott Wolf is living and raising his kids in Utah. (Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Sony Pictures Television)
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“He flies to Toronto to do his show,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, you live here? Why don’t I live here?’”
He added that it “takes that courage to say, ‘Oh, I don’t have to live in L.A.,” after McKellar interjected, “You start realizing, I’m a grownup, I can choose [where to live].”
Taylor noted that people make decisions on where to live often based on their children.
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Danica McKellar with Melissa Joan Hart in Nashville in 2023. (Jason Davis/Getty Images for Alzheimer’s Association)
“We moved out of L.A. when our kids were really young and that was a deliberate choice because we sort of felt the older they get, the more we’re not going to want to pull them from their friends,” Taylor, who shares two grown children with Ben Stiller, said. The couple lives in New York.
“It was still challenging when they were 8 and 5 to do it. But it was the right decision for our family,” she added.
Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor have been married since 2000. (Bruce Glikas/WireImage)
Lascher also explained that nobody meets in person in the entertainment business anymore.
“Every other business is back in the office, but all my meetings, whether it’s writing or producing or even reading for stuff, it’s all on Zoom or video,” he revealed.
Taylor called it a “casualty of COVID.”
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“But it is convenient,” McKellar added.
Other celebrities like Mark Wahlberg, Sylvester Stallone, Jessica Simpson, Dean Cain and Ali Larter have also talked about leaving Los Angeles behind as they continue their careers.
“We’re like, ‘Let’s give it a go,’ and we were really, really lucky to find an amazing community there,” Larter, who stars on “Landman,” told Fox News Digital last year about her family’s move to Idaho. “And we really, really responded to the ethos of that town. It’s a simpler life with really generous people, and there’s an accountability when you live in a small town that we really loved raising our children in.”
Cain told “Fox & Friends” in 2023 that he loves “California, the most beautiful state – everything’s wonderful about it except for the policies.” He now lives in Henderson, Nevada.