James Van Der Beek recently said he would only return to a Hollywood career if it didn’t affect raising his six kids.
The 45-year-old “Dawson’s Creek” alum was speaking with Fox News Digital about moving out of Hollywood and embracing a different lifestyle in Texas when he made the remarks.
“We love it. We have a lot more space,” Van Der Beek said, referring to himself and his wife Kimberly, who wed in 2010. “We all need a more immediate connection to nature. It’s been a really, really great move and the kids are really happy.”
“The parks have been amazing,” he continued. “We’ve been going to state parks and the national parks. It’s just one of the benefits of getting out of the big city was getting to a place where we could just have more space right outside our door. It’s a very, it’s a very different life.”
“We watch the sunset,” the actor explained. “We know what phase the moon is in. We can actually see stars, which is a new thing.”
The “Varsity Blues” alum also mentioned how he wouldn’t sacrifice the responsibility of fatherhood for a movie role, though he is still interested in the storytelling aspect of Hollywood.
“I’ve been trying to set things up right now so that I can spend the most amount of time with my family,” Van Der Beek told Fox News. “I’ve been writing and developing. I am actually feeling the call to collaborate with some really brilliant people and act again. I will see. It would have to be something that I really, really believed in.”
“I was really enjoying the kind of career that I had been wanting to build for quite some time before 2020 and now my priorities have changed,” the actor explained. “It would really have to fit around my life. I do love telling stories. That is something that I’ve always wanted to do, and I think I’ll always continue to do that.”
In 2020, just after moving to his 36-acre Austin property, the actor told Today Parents: “We were living on this tiny little lot with a tiny backyard,” Van Der Beek said. “He [8-year-old son Joshua] seemed to be like an animal in a cage that was too small.”
Van Der Beek isn’t the only actor ditching Los Angeles for greener pastures. Just a few months ago, pop star Katy Perry discussed her thoughts on leaving Hollywood for a more rural existence.
“I’m like, living in Kentucky, and I have for almost a month now. And that’s quite an amazing experience. Because it reminds you that Hollywood is not America,” Perry told Chelsea Handler during a podcast interview, The Daily Wire previously reported.
Perry went on to discuss how exposure to other lifestyles can help celebrities relate more to everyday Americans.
“You need to remember that,” Perry continued. “Because I think you can understand people better…I mean they’re living in a bubble of sorts. We’re living in a bubble. Our bubbles are completely opposite. But they’re — it’s interesting.”