At some point in their careers, these celebs looked at their artistic and professional
achievements, fame, fortune, and shelves full of awards and said, "This isn't for me."
Then they left acting behind and were fortunate enough to discover the things they really
wanted to do.
After five seasons of the popular Comedy Central sketch show Key & Peele, it was obvious that
Jordan Peele would move on to something even bigger.
Most people would have predicted starring roles in a string of big-screen comedies.
He threw the world for a loop when he chose to be a filmmaker instead, writing and directing
the satirical horror movie Get Out, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original
Screenplay.
In other words, this new trajectory suits Peele.
One of the best-reviewed movies of 2017, Get Out clinched his decision, but so did one
of the worst-reviewed movies, according to Complex.
During his acceptance speech for best rookie director at the Directors Guild of America
Awards in February 2018, Peele said,
"The Emoji Movie actually helped me quit acting.
I was offered the role of Poop.
This is true.
I would not make this up."
"What?!"
There was a brief period after the release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999 in which
many people thought that Heather Donahue would never work again because she was actually
dead.
That's how effective Blair Witch was as the pioneering classic of modern "found footage"-style
horror movies.
When the world realized the movie was fiction, Donahue got very famous very fast, but was
also so closely tied to the film that she couldn't keep a decent career going, according
to People magazine.
"I wasn't getting to do things that I was very proud of putting out into the world."
And so she gave it all up…for marijuana.
In her 2012 memoir GrowGirl: How My Life After The Blair Witch Project Went to Pot, Donahue
recounted how she followed a boyfriend into the world of high-scale marijuana farming
in California.
The central cast of the raunchy 2002 cult classic The Sweetest Thing Cameron Diaz, Selma
Blair, and Christina Applegate reunited in 2018 for an Entertainment Weekly profile.
When asked if the actresses ever hung out, Diaz said she'd like to and that she had the
time, off-handedly noting that she's currently, quote, "literally doing nothing," then adding
that she's "actually retired."
A few weeks earlier, Blair claimed to Metro that since appearing in the remake of Annie
in 2014 and marrying Good Charlotte guitarist Benji Madden in 2015, Diaz had quietly quit
Hollywood.
She explained,
"Cameron's retired from acting.
I mean, she doesn't need to make any more films, she has a pretty great life, I don't
know what it would take to bring her back.
She's happy."
You might remember Lisa Jakub from such unforgettable mid-1990s blockbusters as Mrs. Doubtfire and
Independence Day.
But around the year 2000, she quit acting.
In 2013, Jakub wrote on her blog,
"The competition and the politics and the superficial nature of the industry started
to get to me.
I felt like a phony who was trying to live someone else's dream."
She added that the nastiness of Hollywood increased her anxiety and depression, so she
left show business before she could turn into, quote, "a train wreck of a former child actor."
These days, Jakub plays a lot of roles, just offscreen: in addition to her blog, she's
published books, she's a public speaker, and she teaches yoga and writing.
Ariana Richards was a very successful child and teen star in the late 1980s and early
1990s, appearing in movies like Prancer, Tremors, and, most famously, Jurassic Park.
Richards appeared in a few more films after the release of that box office smash in 1993,
but she's basically retired from the art of filmmaking in favor of the art of painting.
Oddly, it was Jurassic Park that inspired her career shift and artistic awakening.
Richards told People magazine in 2011,
"I wanted to boil down the whole experience of Jurassic into my art.
I painted an image of me from the Jell-O scene.
I ended up presenting Steven [Spielberg] with one of my paintings at the end of filming."
"My last painting of a dinosaur was the self portrait I did as Lex with the superimposed
image of the raptor kind of going across my face."
Nowadays, Richards has her own art gallery in Salem, Oregon, called Gallery Ariana.
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