Kevin Sorbo left California for Florida seven years ago, and the former Hercules star says he's not looking back. The 67-year-old actor, who spent the 1990s as a household name playing the title role in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, says people in Hollywood dismissed him after he publicly supported Donald Trump, and that the industry's political drift is a big reason he packed up his family and moved east.
Sorbo told Fox News, per a report from The Independent, that he left California partly because he felt canceled over his conservative Christian political beliefs. He put it plainly, saying California can keep its taxes, traffic and negativity, according to the same account. Sorbo, a vocal critic of Hollywood, also said conservatives are effectively in the closet after watching what happened to him professionally once he went public with his views.
That claim of industry blacklisting isn't new for Sorbo. In an August 2023 interview reported by Beliefnet, Sorbo said his longtime talent agent and manager dropped him as a client after he began speaking publicly about his conservative political and Christian religious views, telling him they could no longer land him acting jobs in Hollywood.
From Hercules to Health Scare to Homeschooling
Sorbo's path to stardom and then away from it has been anything but linear. Hercules: The Legendary Journeys followed a series of five television films before becoming the long-running series that ended in 1999, and Sorbo also later played Captain Dylan Hunt in Andromeda and appeared in the final season of The O.C. But in 1997, while filming the fifth season of Hercules, he suffered a shoulder aneurysm and three brain strokes that left him with permanent partial vision loss — a health emergency he kept private for 14 years until detailing it in his 2011 memoir True Strength, as reported by the A.V. Club.
Sorbo is still working today, focusing on producing, directing, and acting in faith-based films. He and his wife, actor and conservative activist Sam Sorbo, homeschooled their three children and built out an independent production outfit, Sorbo Studios, to make movies centered on traditional values, according to Movieguide. Sorbo now has several family-oriented movies to his name, including work on the Christian rock-star film Elijah Peel, and one of his and Sam's children, Braeden Sorbo, is himself an actor and the author of a pro-masculinity book.
What He Misses About the West Coast
Despite the frustrations that pushed him out, Sorbo says he misses California's weather, his old house, and his local golf course. Before the move, he lived in Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks in Ventura County, where he owned a home and belonged to a nearby course, according to a report from WWBL. Even so, he says Florida has given his family more acceptance since they relocated, and he's called Florida winters really quite amazing, though he's noted the state's high humidity lasts about five months out of the year.
A Bigger Pattern of Wealthy Californians Heading to Florida
Sorbo's move fits into a much larger financial migration. Effective January 2024, California eliminated the wage ceiling on its 1.1% State Disability Insurance tax, pushing the top state tax rate for high earners to 14.4% when combined with the existing 13.3% top income bracket, according to Kiplinger. Florida, by contrast, imposes no personal income tax at all.
IRS interstate migration data analyzed by the Tax Foundation shows California lost more than 100,000 tax filers and nearly $11.9 billion in adjusted gross income in tax year 2022 alone, while Florida gained over $20.6 billion in adjusted gross income from arriving residents. Sorbo isn't the only famous face making that exact trip — actor Sylvester Stallone permanently relocated from Los Angeles to a $35 million Palm Beach estate in early 2024 after nearly 50 years in California, saying the move fit his personality better, per Business Insider.
Faith-Based Films Are Big Business Now
Sorbo's pivot away from mainstream studio work has also lined up with real growth in the independent faith-based film market. His 2014 film God's Not Dead, in which he played an atheist philosophy professor, earned $60.7 million in North American box office on a production budget of roughly $1.15 million, according to data from The Numbers, and it went on to spawn a multi-movie franchise. More recently, independent distributor Angel Studios finished among Hollywood's top 10 theatrical distributors in 2025 with $161.8 million in total box office gross, fueled by family and faith-focused releases, per a report cited by Crosswalk.
Sorbo's grievances with the industry aren't limited to casting decisions. In February 2021, Facebook permanently removed his official page, which had more than 500,000 followers, saying he had repeatedly shared debunked claims about COVID-19 and vaccines, according to Fox Business. Sorbo disputed the removal at the time and alleged Facebook had shadow-banned his posts even before deleting the account. Seven years after leaving California, Sorbo maintains that the entertainment industry remains biased against people with conservative or Christian views, a claim he continues to make even as his independent film career keeps him working steadily from his new home in Florida.
