By Michaela Gordoni
FORREST GUMP star and veteran’s advocate Gary Sinise ditched California for — you guessed it — Nashville.
“When I stepped away from acting in 2019…I had made some money. I had some investments going,” said Sinise, whose son, Mac, had been a rare form of cancer diagnosed in 2018. “Mac fought for the next four or five years, and I was his battle buddy and just fighting with him. And my wife had a lot of challenges and everything.”
“My dad had had a stroke and died in 2021. My mom was aging and falling apart. I mean, they needed me and that was important,” he recalled to Fox News Digital.
Sinise wondered if he went back to work how his money would be spent in California. And it just didn’t seem worth it.
“Do I want to spend all the money here in California paying these big prices for gas and property taxes and all the different things?’ The house we had was a house that was very good for our family because it was big enough…We could provide shelter for a lot of the family members that may have been struggling at the time, but we weren’t in need of that anymore,” he continued.
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But then “I really started zeroing in on the lifestyle here,” the 71-year-old said. “There’s a gas station where I was getting gas for $2.59 a gallon. And then I visited California, you know, and they’re up at like, you know, $5.79 a gallon.”
He notes that he’s happy with his expenses in Tennessee.
“I like the no tax state. I like saving a bit more money. If I was still in California and not working, that money would be moving a lot faster out the door than it is right now,” Sinise said.
“So I wanted to save money and prepare for the future. I don’t want to give it all to California and property taxes. I’d rather give it to my kids later on,” he said.
Sinise hasn’t acted in any serious roles since he stepped away in 2019.
“I stepped away from acting in 2019 to focus on the family. And, you know, I’ll say it to anybody. You’ll never regret doing that,” he said.
Sinise recently wrote a memoir about Mac and his family’s experience with his cancer and death called Graceful Warrior.
“You might pass up some good opportunities along the way, but if you pass up the opportunities to help your family through a difficult time, you’re missing something,” Sinise said. “…I had good years in the movie business and in the television business. And maybe in some ways, that was God just giving me something because we were going to be facing some very, very difficult things.”
Now, most of his efforts are concentrated into advocating and providing services for vets. His foundation just celebrated the gift of its 104th home to a wounded vet.
Sinise told Fox News, “Every time we do it, it gets me. We have to take care of them. I think that the government has a role, of course, to do as much as they can, but I don’t think the government can do everything for every single veteran and we as citizens have a role to play and pick up the charge.”
It seems that leaving California gave Sinise the freedoms he needed to pour into what really matters to him.
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