20 celebrities who moved to Texas on why it's the best place for them

Roseanne Barr's son, Jake Pentland, told Us Weekly in June 2025 that his famous mother had traded the Hollywood Hills for Texas Hill Country, a region in central Texas that includes cities like Austin and New Braunfels.

"My mom lives with me, my wife, and my two daughters — she's the best grandma," Pentland told the magazine.

In a separate interview with Fox News Digital, Barr said living in Texas is a "dream come true."

"I'm doing a lot of mowing. I've got a really fantastic tractor out here, and I'm mowing," Barr said. "The only problem is I don't clear the trees quite as good as I should, and I'm always hitting a tree and knocking it over, and it always hits me in the head."

A native of Texas, Duff decided with her fiancé Matt Rosenberg to pack up the kids and leave California once the pandemic hit.

At first, she was nervous that the move would hurt her career.

"I think so much of my fear of moving out of Los Angeles was that my career was there and that I would never work again or something like that," she told Fox News Digital in 2022. "And, you know, I think this has all taught us that Zoom certainly can be a very powerful tool. And we can, you know, very luckily for me, get to continue to work from here, and I get to live near my dad. I haven't lived, here, near my dad in a really long time."

The son of Clint Eastwood, Scott has been methodically building his own career, showing up in the "Fast and Furious" franchise and Guy Ritchie movies.

During his downtime in Texas, he does everything from fishing to hunting.

"I think that's why people who come to Texas really can fall in love with it," he told Flaunt in 2021 from his home in Austin. "There's more community, people are more neighborly, people are nice. It slows life down a little bit. It's not this fast-paced living in a big city like New York or Los Angeles."

In 2020, "Entourage" and "The Devil Wears Prada" star Adrian Grenier left the Hollywood Hills for a 46-acre sustainable ranch in Bastrop, Texas, a city about 40 minutes southeast of Austin.

While in Texas, Grenier has continued acting and most recently appeared in the short film "Self Custody," about a struggling father who loses a cryptocurrency fortune. The film was shot in Austin, near his home.

In an interview with Page Six in March, Grenier said Texas' burgeoning film and television industry will keep him in the state.

"There's $2.5 billion that the Texas state government just put into film and television projects in Texas," Grenier said. "They're building three movie studios not too far from me. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't just continue to film in Texas."

After spending most of her life jet-setting around the world trying to conquer the modeling industry, Hadid decided recently to take some time away from the spotlight.

In early 2024, she spoke to Allure about moving to Texas to focus on her mental and physical health (she was diagnosed with Lyme Disease in 2013), and be with her then boyfriend, cowboy Adan Banuelos.

"Just as I have styled myself for years now — which I still do — I love being able to do my own hair and makeup, be happy with how I look, and get ready with my girlfriends here in Texas," Hadid told Allure. "We have the best time, and I never feel like I need to do too much."

"For the first time now, I'm not putting on a fake face. If I don't feel good, I won't go. If I don't feel good, I take time for myself. And I've never had the opportunity to do that or say that before," Hadid added. "Now, when anybody sees me in pictures, and they say I look happy, I genuinely am. I am feeling better; my bad days now were my old good days."

Harrelson lived in Hawaii for many years before moving back to his home state of Texas in 2023.

Now in the Lone Star State and living outside Austin, the actor has lobbied alongside longtime friend Matthew McConaughey to make Texas a hub for film and television production.

In 2025, the Texas House approved Senate Bill 22, which provides $300 million every two years through 2035 to support the local film industry.

Supermodel Chanel Iman and her husband, New Orleans Saints football player Davon Godchaux, purchased a spacious ranch about 90 minutes west of Dallas, Architectural Digest reported in June.

"Texas gave us the freedom to dream bigger," Iman told Architectural Digest. "We love the land, the openness, being surrounded by nature. That's really what brought us here, and it's a dream come true."

The star has enjoyed visiting Austin for decades but finally decided to live there in 2020.

"I love it. I've been coming here for 20 years," he told "Live with Kelly and Ryan" in 2020. "I'm much closer to my mom and everybody. I love it. It's great."

The former Uber CEO announced on the daily live video and audio podcast TBPN in March that he had moved to Texas in December 2025.

Kalanick joins a slew of tech billionaires, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who have left California for greener pastures.

The former mixed martial arts fighter turned TikTok food critic has set up shop in Texas.

After living in Las Vegas, Lee relocated to Texas in November 2024. In a December video reviewing the downtown Dallas restaurant The Wicked Butcher, he revealed that he now lives in Dallas.

"One thing I do love about the Dallas food scene — we've been here a month, a month and a half — they do have some nice fine dining restaurants," Lee said.

Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey and wife Camila Alves settled in Austin in 2012 after buying a 10,800-square-foot mansion.

According to a 2024 profile in Southern Living, the move to Texas was initially because of a "family crisis," when he needed to help his mother and two brothers. The couple decided to stay put and raise their three children there.

"Ritual came back," McConaughey said of being back in Texas. "Whether that was Sunday church, sports, dinner together as a family every night, or staying up after that telling stories in the kitchen, sitting at the island pouring drinks and nibbling while retelling them all in different ways than we told them before."

Elon Musk has moved both SpaceX and Tesla's headquarters out of California to Texas.

In 2020, Musk announced that he had moved to Texas at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council summit.

Musk has said he owns a tiny home in Texas, and records show he bought a house in Austin in 2022.

In 2022, O'Neal bought a 5,269-square-foot home in Carrollton listed at $1,224,000 and sold it in 2024 for an undisclosed amount, though it was listed for $1.7 million, according to Realtor.com.

That year, Chexy Trust, tied to the Carrollton purchase, bought a 4,670-square-foot home in Rockwall County. In 2024, O'Neal opened a branch of his Big Chicken chain restaurant in Fort Worth.

As his footprint in the region grows, he told Dallas television station WFAA he plans to make the area his home base.

"I'm 75% going to move here full time," O'Neal said last June. "I have to see what's going on with TNT next year, but based on that, you'll probably be seeing a lot more of me."

The "Twisters" star, who is also a native Texan, recently moved back to Austin from Los Angeles to be close to his family and improve his mental health.

"When all you do is consume movies and entertainment, you could become a little self-aware and maybe derivative of yourself," Powell told USA Today. "Your personal life, there's no sort of freedom there, there's storytelling around that, and I feel like that's just not good for you on the long term."

Padalecki ditched Hollywood for Texas before it was a trend. The "Supernatural" star, a San Antonio native, relocated from Los Angeles to Austin with his wife, Genevieve, in 2012.

In an Instagram video taken on Austin's 24th Street in 2020, he explained why he loves the city so much.

"Austin brings me a warmth and a happiness and a peace that I have been unable to find anywhere else in my travels," Padalecki said. "I love being here."

Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons, who got engaged in 2017 and married in 2022, thought they'd temporarily go to Texas, Plemons' home state, during the pandemic, but have since grown accustomed to life there.

In an interview with CBS News Sunday Morning, Dunst said that she's enjoyed her time in Texas.

"It's everything," she said. "People care less because it's not a movie town. They're better with children, the parks are nicer."

Plemons told Texas Monthly in a 2024 cover story that the couple was renovating their home in East Austin, potentially to move into it for good.

"The people just look at you in a different way," Plemons told Texas Monthly. "They're not on the hamster wheel."

In 2025, former "Selling Sunset" star Christine Quinn relocated to her home state of Texas after splitting from her ex-husband, tech entrepreneur Christian Dumontet.

Quinn now lives in a suburb outside Dallas with her young son, Christian.

"I am really, really grateful to be living here," Quinn told People in January, adding that she's happy to be closer to family. "I have a sister who lives really close to me, and my son has a cousin. So it's really something that I needed as opposed to the chaos when I was in Los Angeles."

Like many other celebs, Rogan left Los Angeles once the pandemic hit.

In a 2023 episode of his popular podcast, "The Joe Rogan Experience," he explained why he ended up in Texas.

"Then we went to the lake, and people are playing music and jumping in the water," said Rogan, adding that his kids "were like, 'We want to live here!'"

"That was it. Two months later, I lived here," he said in the podcast episode.

"The Sopranos" star moved to Austin in 2021 with her family, husband Cutter Dykstra, and sons Beau and Jack.

"I almost feel more connected to my craft and why I love acting," Sigler told The New York Times in 2021. "When the calls come in, it's a beautiful surprise. I'm still on things and I'm still a businesswoman and it's still my career, but I don't feel the pressure around it because we took a stand for ourselves and we made decisions for our families."

Alcynna Lloyd is a real estate reporter with Business Insider.  She writes about homebuying behavior, tiny homes, multi-generational housing, migration trends, and housing affordability.Prior to joining Business Insider, Lloyd was the Digital Media Manager at HousingWire.Do you have feedback or a tip?  Find her on X/Twitter, LinkedIn, or email [email protected]. Some of her articles include:

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• I was tired of paying rent for my small business, so I bought the building. I've made over $100,000 renting it on Airbnb to support my café.
• I'm 61 with 16 grandkids. Instead of downsizing, we bought a bigger vacation home to finally make family trips work.
• I paid $65 for a giant collection of vintage dishes at a thrift store. Then I found out it's worth almost $1,000.

Jason is an award-winning entertainment correspondent at Business Insider and has covered various aspects of the film industry for close to two decades. On the site his reporting can range from what's going on behind-the-scenes at some of the biggest companies in Hollywood to colorful interviews with some of the most well-known names in entertainment.In 2020, Jason received the New York Press Club award and Los Angeles Press Club award for his story on the rise and fall of MoviePass. It has since been made into the HBO documentary "MoviePass, MovieCrash."Previous to BI, Jason was the managing editor at Filmmaker Magazine, one of the leading publications in the independent film industry. He's also written for numerous publications over the years, including Vanity Fair, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vulture, Variety, and indieWire.Popular ArticlesGrowing up Marvel: The tormented life of Stan Lee's child, JC LeeA bullet. A legend. A lie. Bufford Pusser killed his wife, authorities say. What happens to his legacy now?Battles with Rupert Murdoch to gaining David Fincher's respect: How 'Fight Club' went from box-office bust to '90s cult classic