Recently, Reddit user u/fulthrottlejazzhands asked, “Who is a celebrity that gave it all up at the height of fame to go live a ‘normal’ life?” Here’s a look at what these former (and not so former) actors got up to after they left Hollywood:
1.After playing Hilary from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Karyn Parsons co-created her own sitcom, Lush Life, but it was soon canceled. She eventually moved to New York, where she studied filmmaking, met her husband, and started a family. She told Vice, “My interests were changing. It became very difficult to do everything, to memorize lines for a part and have to get someone to last-minute watch the kids — to race across town and do all that, and if you got a call back, do it again. I’d find myself dropping the ball a lot.”
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In 2005, following her acting career, Parsons founded Sweet Blackberry, a nonprofit that teaches kids about the lesser-known aspects of Black history. She said, “When I was pregnant with my daughter, that’s when I started really thinking about what are they going to teach her in school, and what am I supposed to teach her? How do I supplement her education as a parent? As I was talking a lot about Black history and stories that you don’t hear about, my husband was like, ‘You need to do this.'”
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2.’90s teen heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas left his role on Home Improvement before the series ended, deciding instead to focus on his education at Columbia, Harvard, and St. Andrew’s University.
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Though he returned to acting a few years later, in 2013, he once again disappeared from the public eye. JTT told People, “I’d been going nonstop since I was 8 years old. I wanted to go to school, to travel, and have a bit of a break…To sit in a big library amongst books and students — that was pretty cool. It was a novel experience for me.”
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3.Erik Per Sullivan, who played Dewey on Malcolm in the Middle for seven seasons, left acting for good in 2010. After attending the University of Southern California, he’s now a graduate student studying Victorian Literature.
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Jane Kaczmarek, who played his onscreen mother, recently reflected on the former actor: “He’s very, very well. He did Malcolm for seven years. He started at 7; he ended at 14. He wasn’t interested in acting at all.”
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4.Similarly, Malcolm in the Middle and Agent Cody Banks star Frankie Muniz also stepped away from acting, saying, “When I was on Malcolm, I was just so excited to be working on a show, but also in that same sense, when the show ended, I kind of left the business for a little bit. I started doing other things. I was racing cars. I joined a band.”
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However, since taking a break from acting in 2006, Muniz is now set to return to Hollywood for a four-episode reboot of Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+.
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5.Good Luck Charlie and Lemonade Mouth actor Bridgit Mendler traded in Hollywood for a Master’s degree from MIT and a Doctor of Law degree from Harvard. She now works in the space industry as the CEO of her startup Northwood Space, which aims “to build satellite ground stations that are designed with mass production and customer flexibility first in mind.”
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As she announced on social media, Mendler and her husband are also the parents of a 5-year-old son. She wrote, “Started fostering in 2021, adopted near Christmas of 2022. I’m so lucky—being a parent is the biggest gift and most defining experience there is.”
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6.In 1997, following Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, comedian Rick Moranis stepped away from acting to focus on his two children after his wife, Anna, died from breast cancer. Although he’s said it wasn’t a “formal decision” to retire, he hasn’t been seen on the big screen in several decades.
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In 2015, Moranis told The Hollywood Reporter, “I took a break, which turned into a longer break. But I’m interested in anything that I would find interesting. I still get the occasional query about a film or television role…I was working with really interesting people, wonderful people [in Hollywood]. I went from that to being at home with a couple of little kids, which is a very different lifestyle. But it was important to me. I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever. My life is wonderful.”
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7.Disney star Kay Panabaker retired from acting in 2012, following roles in Summerland and Cyber Bully. Though she already had a degree in history from UCLA, she decided to go back to school and entered an 18-month animal program at Santa Fe College in Florida. Following that, she was hired as a zookeeper at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
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In 2016, she responded to a fan who asked her why she quit acting and said, “I just lost the love for acting. Life is short, we spend so much time at work, gotta do what you love 🙂 and I love my job!!”
8.If you can believe it, Peter Ostrum, the actor who played Charlie in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, left the entertainment industry and became a dairy veterinarian. According to Ostrum, he stopped acting because “being in the film industry as a child was hard.”
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In 2011, he told Hollywood Chicago, “In the end, leaving was the right decision. … I don’t have any regrets at all.”
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9.Erik von Detten, aka the ’90s and ’00s Disney star of The Princess Diaries and Brink! fame, eventually left acting behind and went into finance. He said to E! Online, “At that time, we didn’t have Netflix and all these expanded options with thousands and thousands of roles. I would literally go for a length of time without any roles that I fit the bill for. I mean, you’re either in the very top half a percent doing very well or, well…it’s just very competitive.”
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He said, “Since I was a kid, I wanted to have a large family. And, in Los Angeles, that requires a consistent, realistic income. So, the fickle nature of employment as an actor just wasn’t consistent enough for me.”
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10.Jennifer Stone, who played Harper on Wizards of Waverly Place, left acting behind and is now a registered nurse.
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In an Instagram post celebrating World Health Day in 2020, Stone announced that she was joining the “front lines” of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. She said, “A very good friend of mine…pointed out to me that today is #worldhealthday. It is also the day I went from a volunteer, then a student nurse, and now an RN resident. I just hope to live up to all of the amazing healthcare providers on the front lines now as I get ready to join them.”
11.Though he hasn’t left the spotlight entirely, Vampire Diaries star Ian Somerhalder officially retired from acting in 2019. Since stepping away, Somerhalder has focused on raising his kids on a farm with wife Nikki Reed, starting companies, and producing documentaries that focus on how “regenerative farming and improving the world’s soil can help combat climate change.”
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In a 2024 interview, Somerhalder said, “I loved what I did for a really long time. I don’t miss any of it. I love making films. I just did it for so long. We had an amazing run.”
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12.Rick Astley of “Never Gonna Give You Up” fame might be back in the spotlight now with new music, but the singer took a hefty 30-year-long break from the music industry when he was only 27. According to ITV, Astley’s sudden retirement was prompted by burnout.
In a 2023 interview, Astley spoke about his first music stint saying, “I didn’t love the world of pop music, to be honest, because what I dreamed it was and what I wanted it to be, it kind of wasn’t.”
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13.Entourage’s Adrian Grenier, who left California for Texas, revealed that he stepped away from acting to focus on raising his family and connecting with nature. In an interview on Today with Hoda and Jenna, he said, “I was flying high for many years, two decades in Hollywood and growing up in New York, but I live a much more grounded life now. I decided I was going to live closer to nature and to commit to my wife and have a family and have a child, which I’m so excited about.”
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Though the actor says he isn’t completely retired from acting, it would have to be a special project for him to head back to Hollywood. He said, “I’m only really taking roles that are aligned with my dharma and that I can be proud of because I want my kid to watch whatever I do and be proud of his dad.”
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14.Phoebe Cates, of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Gremlins fame, left acting in the mid-’90s after marrying fellow actor Kevin Kline. Though she did make a small appearance in a 2001 movie as a favor to Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kline told Playboy magazine that the couple “agreed to alternate so that we’re never working at the same time … [but] whenever it’s been her slot to work, Phoebe has chosen to stay with the children.”
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In addition to motherhood, Cates also owns and operates the Blue Tree boutique in New York City.
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15.Former child actor Shirley Temple announced her retirement in 1950 at the age of only 22 because she “had enough of pretend.”
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She eventually got married and pursued a political career in Washington, DC, most notably as a US ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia.
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16.In 2000, Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire star Mara Wilson left acting to focus on writing. In 2016, she told NPR, “There wasn’t like one big moment where I knew I was done. … The rejection hurt because it had been just such a prominent part of my life for so long. It had been the thing that defined me. I remember in college, I would sleep through my acting classes — I would self-sabotage — because I was so afraid to let people see me as an actor. … I was terrified; I was frozen with fear. That’s when I started focusing more on writing. Writing I’d always loved.”
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In 2016, Wilson went on to write a book about her life, titled Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame. In 2023, she wrote another book titled Good Girls Don’t, which is “a coming-of-age memoir that bravely examines both the friendships Wilson formed as a child actor in Hollywood and the complex family relationships that shaped her.”
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