Danny McBride says leaving Los Angeles for Charleston, South Carolina, changed both his work and his home life. He moved his family in 2017, and he says the shift gave him more creative freedom while also giving him a different kind of day-to-day life with his wife, Gia Ruiz, and their two children.
The timing matters because McBride is still explaining why that move worked for him now. On Rich Roll, he linked the decision to how he wants to live and work, not just where he wanted to shoot. He said that when he was making Eastbound & Down in Wilmington, North Carolina, executives never came to set because, at the time, there was no direct flight from Los Angeles, and that distance became part of the point.
By McBride’s account, geography helped shape the job. If people in Los Angeles could not easily drop in, he said, the production had more room to breathe. He and Ruiz share son Declan, 14, and daughter Ava, 10, and he said the move was also about more than work. It was about being around for his children, being a better partner for his wife and building a life that was not organized around a television schedule.
That is where the story gets less polished than a simple escape from Hollywood and more revealing. McBride said he tries to limit his children’s access to social media and wants the voices around them to come from him and Ruiz, not strangers online. He said life in Charleston has made that easier, with neighborhood kids into fishing and getting out in the water, but he also admitted that fatherhood changed him in a way work never had. “It was really easy to do this job when I didn’t have kids,” he said.
McBride’s point is not that family and creativity compete. It is that he can protect both only by designing his life differently from the way many Hollywood careers are built. Charleston is part of that design, and the unanswered question is whether that kind of distance can keep holding when the demands of the next project start pressing back in.
