Nick Searcy says COVID pushed him to leave Hollywood for Nashville

Mark Wahlberg, Joe Rogan, Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman and Sylvester Stallone. 

While the stars are among the prominent names who have traded California for homes elsewhere, there are many others to add to the roster.

Among them is veteran character actor Nick Searcy, who has a lot to say about his departure from the Golden State.

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Searcy, who moved to Los Angeles in the early ’90s, became a Hollywood character actor, known for his role in the popular TV series “Justified,” as well as film roles in 1993’s “The Fugitive,” 2000’s “Cast Away,” 2003’s “Runaway Jury” and, more recently, 2024’s “Reagan” and Netflix’s “The Perfect Couple,” which was also released that year.

The actor, an outspoken conservative, told Fox News Digital that in the early ’90s, LA was still a wonderful place to work.

“I’m old enough to remember when Hollywood was this beautiful, kind of inaccessible place that, you know, if you were really good at acting, you could some day move to. That’s how I grew up,” Searcy recalled.

“There was a lot of activity. I had 15 auditions a week during pilot season… but then it started to go downhill. They started to centralize more and more of the Democrat power base, and they just systematically took that city down,” he continued.

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As the years went on, Searcy said he increasingly worked outside Los Angeles, including in Oklahoma, Toronto, Atlanta, the Dominican Republic and London.

“It was like, I would never shoot anything in Los Angeles,” he said. And he said to his wife, “Why are we here? Why are we still here paying all these taxes?”

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The last straw for Searcy was when COVID hit.

“We realized that it wasn’t just the government that was crazy, it was all of our neighbors,” Searcy quipped. “They were wanting to put us in jail for not wearing our mask over our nose or not getting vaccinated. And that’s when my wife turns to me and says, ‘Yeah, we got to go.’”

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Like many others before him, Searcy, a North Carolina native, and his wife, a Kentucky native, relocated their family to Nashville in 2021. Searcy said they now split their time between Music City and a small town in Kentucky.

“… It was a logical place for us to land with family near and a lot of my friends from California were here already,” he said. “A lot more people have come since then. It’s pretty crowded.”

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While many celebrities have left California, some have maintained homes in the state while making another state their primary residence.

Yet even that’s changing.

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Actor Dennis Quaid, who moved to Nashville in 2020, only recently moved from his Brentwood Hills home after decades of building his career in LA.

Quaid has noted the community he’s built in Nashville and how LA once had that back in the day when actors attended auditions in person. Since then, the industry has evolved into a place where auditions are primarily done online.

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Besides Tennessee, others have cut ties and left for Florida, Nevada, Texas and beyond.

Searcy said that 20 years ago, he couldn’t have imagined what has happened to the iconic City of Angels.

“The city’s been destroyed, and I think it’s deliberate,” Searcy said. “I think they’re deliberately making it impossible to live there so that all the sensible people move away. That way, the political class stays in power because the only people that are left there believe their nonsense.”

“I don’t see how anybody stays there,” he continued. “So many people have left. It makes sense for the industry to move because the people that kept it afloat, the sort of people — the talents that they were basing a business on — they’ve all moved out. So it makes perfect sense for the studios to start taking advantage of the fact that there are better, more economically viable places to run your business.”

He even thinks a possible move by Paramount to Nashville, as rumored, isn’t a bad idea.

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“I think it’s the best thing that could possibly happen,” Searcy said. “I think the film business has left California anyway. It’s time for the industry to start finding its footing elsewhere because shooting there is just impossible. Unless you’re Netflix or Amazon and have all the money in the world, California is not the place to be anymore.”