Trading the Limelight for Lambs: Famous Faces Who Went Rural

The International Stars Who Discovered Another Kind of Good Life

There is a curious thing that seems to happen to people after they’ve acquired enough of the things we’re all supposed to want.

They want some land.

In America, the celebrity-ranch story is practically its own genre. Harrison Ford has his Wyoming spread. Tom Selleck has famously preferred life on his California ranch to the Hollywood social circuit. And Kevin Costner inevitably turns up somewhere in the conversation, although his California retreat is rather more oceanfront eco-hideaway than cattle-and-fence-post territory.

Then, of course, there is Jeremy Clarkson.

Anyone who has watched Clarkson’s Farm already knows what happens when a wealthy and extremely confident television personality decides agriculture looks manageable. We adore the show, and its refusal to romanticize country life helped plant one of the early seeds for Twenty Nickels.

But everybody knows those stories.

And there is, as it happens, an entire world beyond Hollywood.

That’s something we’ve been thinking about lately at Twenty Nickels for another reason. A rather lovely portion of celebrities who live on farms find their way to outside the United States. For a while, looking at the cold arithmetic of website advertising, it was easy to see international traffic as somehow less valuable.

We’ve decided that’s a fairly miserable way to look at people.

So instead, let’s go meet some of them.

Darth Vader Bought a Tractor

One of my favorite examples is Hayden Christensen.

After Star Wars turned him into one of the most recognizable actors on the planet, Christensen gradually retreated to a 200-acre farm north of Toronto.

And this wasn’t simply a celebrity house that happened to have a barn somewhere behind the infinity pool.

Christensen learned to operate farm machinery. He built barns and renovated old farmhouses. He acquired an excavator and a bulldozer. Years later, he acknowledged that spending so much time there affected his acting career, but that he knew it would and was perfectly comfortable with the trade.

The farm, he told The Guardian, became a difficult place to want to leave.

There is something rather wonderful about Anakin Skywalker discovering that the Dark Side was apparently show business and salvation involved heavy machinery.

Back to the Farm, Sort Of

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers may be the newest arrival on our list, and possibly the least qualified to be on it.

The Irish actor, best known for The Tudors, Match Point and Bend It Like Beckham, has returned to Ireland after years spent between places including London and Los Angeles. These days, home is a 20-acre farm in County Wexford, where he keeps a few horses and has cheerfully admitted that he isn’t actually farming much of anything yet. He has even described himself as an actor who lives on a farm rather than a farmer who acts.

There is a pleasing bit of symmetry here. Long before Hollywood, Rhys-Meyers briefly worked on a farm in County Cork and quickly concluded that he wasn’t much of a farmer then, either. Three decades later, he has somehow found his way back to the countryside.

And perhaps that’s why his story belongs here.

Not every move to the country needs to end with a vineyard, an organic certification and an artisanal cheese bearing your name. Sometimes you simply arrive, acquire a few animals, discover that you still don’t know what you’re doing and see what happens next.

We can relate.

Twenty Nickels, after all, isn’t the story of people who mastered ranch life and then decided to write about it. We’re still figuring out what this place wants to become, too.

So we’ll be keeping an eye on Jonathan’s Wexford experiment. Apparently goats may be next.

Sting Took the Italian Route

Then there is the European variation, which naturally comes with better wine.

In 1997, Sting and Trudie Styler bought Il Palagio, a centuries-old estate in Tuscany that had fallen into disrepair.

Over the following years they restored the property and replanted its vineyards. Today it is a working organic farm and vineyard producing wine, olive oil, honey, fruit and vegetables.

This is admittedly several tax brackets removed from our little operation.

Still, I recognize something in it.

A vineyard needs pruning whether or not you once sold 100 million records. Olives remain stubbornly indifferent to celebrity. The seasons do not hurry because you have somewhere else to be.

Italian rocker Gianna Nannini has followed another version of that path. Her family’s Certosa di Belriguardo estate outside Siena dates to the 14th century. Nannini took over the agricultural business in 2006 and today its vineyards are focused largely on Sangiovese, with grapes harvested by hand.

Her connection to the place is described less as an investment than as a return to something elemental: land, wine and where she came from.

Maybe that’s the common thread.

What Are We All Running From?

It would be easy to describe this as escapism.

Maybe some of it is.

If you’ve spent decades being photographed, reviewed, interviewed, managed, scheduled and generally observed, a place where your primary audience consists of livestock must have considerable appeal.

But I think there is something else going on.

Much of modern life is abstract.

We send messages about meetings concerning projects that will eventually become files stored somewhere we cannot see. Money moves without changing hands. Work happens on screens. Entertainment happens on other screens. Even friendships increasingly exist partly inside little glowing rectangles.

Then you walk outside and discover that a gate won’t close.

There is nothing abstract about the gate.

It either closes or it doesn’t.

Animals need feeding. Plants need water. Weather arrives whether you’ve checked the forecast or not. Something is always growing, dying, escaping, nesting, blooming or eating something you specifically hoped it wouldn’t.

It can be maddening.

It can also be deeply satisfying.

The Luxury Isn’t the Acreage

Celebrity farms make beautiful magazine spreads because, naturally, their farms tend to be beautiful.

But I don’t think the acreage is really the luxury.

The luxury is participation.

It is living somewhere that asks something of you.

Our own ranch is hardly a self-sufficient homestead. We still buy groceries. We have Wi-Fi. There is a swimming pool. Nobody should confuse what we’re doing out here with Little House on the Prairie.

But the longer we’ve lived here, the more I’ve come to appreciate having parts of life that cannot be outsourced to a screen.

The cattle need tending. The olives bud when they’re ready. Deer wander through. Hawks circle overhead. Occasionally a bobcat makes an appearance. And every so often something breaks at precisely the moment you had intended to relax.

The rewards are mostly intangible.

Which may be exactly the point.

For people who have spent their lives accumulating extremely tangible measures of success, perhaps eventually there is something irresistible about a life that keeps score differently.

Not followers.

Not box office.

Not chart positions.

Whether the animals are healthy.

Whether something grew.

Whether you fixed the gate.

Whether, at the end of the day, you can stand outside for a moment, look around at the place you’re responsible for, and think:

This is enough.

Maybe the strange part isn’t that so many successful people eventually head for the country.

Maybe it’s that the rest of us still find it surprising.

POSTSCRIPT: Apparently, We Missed One

September 27, 2026

Just days after we published this story, the prolific actor Willem Dafoe appeared on NPR’s Wild Card and casually revealed that he, too, has joined the famous-people-with-farm-chores club.

Dafoe lives part of the year on a farm in Italy, and when host Rachel Martin asked him to name his favorite farm chore, his answer wasn’t especially glamorous. He likes putting the animals to bed.

He described the nightly ritual of bringing in his 35 goats and sheep from the fields, protecting them from predators and watching the whole herd come stampeding toward him when it’s time to open their shelter. He also noted that there is a certain beauty in cleaning up after them, although we’ll allow prospective gentleman farmers to discover that particular beauty for themselves.

Martin observed that the animals need him in those moments. Dafoe gently corrected her:

“No, they’re helping me. That’s the idea.”

And really, we could have saved ourselves an entire article.