‘L.A.’s Energy Never Resonated with Me’ (Exclusive)

Twenty-five years after Patrick Fugit launched his acting career with the lead role in Almost Famous, the star is now settled into a life in Texas, far from Los Angeles and Hollywood.

Fugit, 42, tells PEOPLE he and his wife Jenny del Rosario moved to Texas with their child, born in 2019, “three years or so” ago.

“I grew up in Utah, and L.A.’s energy never resonated with me,” Fugit says. “I love being on set and I love character development and scene development, I love storytelling, I love being around other actors and good directors. I love making the films. And auditioning and stuff like that is its own… it’s almost like a different art form, or a different part of the business.”

“I guess I’ve always really focused on family through my adult life and my close circle of people. My wife and I, we had our first kid in 2019 and we were in L.A. and we had spent a couple years there,” he adds. “2020 was a very dynamic period of time in L.A. and it was not, in fact, dynamism that we really liked.”

He adds, “We also wanted to have chickens and goats and a big garden and a trampoline in a backyard and cool s— that we have now for our kids.”

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Fugit was a teenager from Salt Lake City when he auditioned for and landed the lead role in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 movie, which marked Fugit’s first screen acting gig.

In Almost Famous, he plays William Miller, a 16-year-old music journalist in 1973 who is given the opportunity of a lifetime when Rolling Stone contracts him to go on the road with the fictional rock band Stillwater and write a long-form article about the group.

Today, Fugit is content keeping distance between himself and L.A. when he is not working.

“That really wasn’t available in L.A. the way we wanted it, and I’ve always appreciated a slower, smaller town,” Fugit says of the physical space and land his family enjoys in Texas.

“I love being out, and we’re in a fairly rural place out here and I love it. It obviously has positives and drawbacks in terms of acting. It used to be very good to be in L.A. when we would get together for auditions in person. Nowadays everything’s very digital, so you can kind of be wherever you want to be.”

Despite Fugit’s distance from Hollywood, he says he still gets recognized by Almost Famous fans while out and about.

“That still happens. That happens a lot,” he says. “I live in north Texas now, kind of in a random middle of nowhere type of place. But it still happens out here [at] I don’t know, the garden store. There’s some people who work at a garden store here, and my wife and I go in there and a couple people there recognize me from Almost Famous. When I go to L.A. or New York, for sure. It’s pretty common.”