Dominic Purcell has invented the perfect formula for finding a second home—or a first home that’s away from it all. By Mike Zimmerman
1. Seek your one word
When Purcell was looking for his new place, he broke down the location requirement into one word: waves. And since San Clemente has some of the best waves on the West Coast, that’s where he started looking. What’s your one word? Culture? Space? Woods? Restaurants? Boil it down to that and you’ll immediately know where to start your search.
2. Fill your biggest need
Purcell’s new place had to accommodate his four kids. “When I first looked at this condo, I thought it was okay,” he says, “but then I saw that backyard and was, like, ‘This is it.’” Now his kids have not only the beach, but a safe space to play and ride their bikes. What do you need? This will filter out a lot of wasteful searching.
3. Gauge the potential for improvement
Look at any place with an eye to the future. Purcell would eventually like to buy
up his entire four-unit building so he can knock down walls and create something bigger and better.
4. Don’t overthink it
A retreat should be simple. Purcell has his necessities and just enough decor to make his place comfortable. “I really don’t need much,” he says. Do you? Probably not. And simplicity means spending less money, thinking less about impressing visitors, and living with less stress in general.
5 Set your privacy level
The whole point of a retreat is peaceful living. That’s why Purcell loves San Clemente. “People don’t give a crap about me here,” he says. “In Hollywood, if I so much as sit outside on Sunset Boulevard for 5 minutes with a girl or a friend, before you know it I’m in some stupid magazine.” Granted, paparazzi probably aren’t your problem. But you can control just how accessible you will be via phone or BlackBerry or (ugh) people just dropping by.
Dominic Purcell’s Great Escape
The Prison Break star broke out of his self-made prison to create a new life. Learn how to fashion your own
By Mike Zimmerman, Photos by Sam Jones
A Bad Place
By necessity, the drinking and the marriage had to end. Purcell, as breezy and laid-back as his new hometown is, was never about the cool buzz. He was more of a fever drunk. He’d work all week, then on Friday bring out the vodka and the pills, draw the blinds, and “just annihilate myself. I’d have 3-day blackouts. When I was on the road, like in New York City, I’d wake up in alleyways, like, ‘What happened?’ ”
Purcell, who was born in Ireland, grew up in Australia, and speaks with a hybrid American-Aussie accent, describes himself as the consummate alpha male: driven, competitive, willing to die for success or victory. For many years, this fueled a bottomless appetite. “The thing is, if you’re extreme, you’re screwed. You have normal people like my ex who can sit on a glass of wine all night long. Me, I don’t just want one glass or even one bottle. I’m the guy who wants to drink all the bottles. I can’t do anything in moderation. Surfing, working, working out—I’m an extremist in everything I do. I’ve accepted that. It’s the way I am.”
The interesting thing is that you can sort of see this in Purcell. Raymond Chandler once described a man’s jaw as a park bench. That fits Purcell. The guy’s the size of a linebacker, about 6'2", thick with muscle and festooned with ink. Shaved head. You can picture his extremism. You can imagine him feverish with booze and flying off any and all rails.
He refuses to say what specific event made him stop drinking, but it must have been a corker, because here’s what he will tell me: “I had that full bottom. I was in New York City. I decided the morning after to stop drinking. And after that, I was suicidal for a weekend. I was on my hands and knees crying my ass off. For a couple of days I had that gnarly experience that my life was over. I was just like, ‘I have to end my life.’ It was that heavy. Then I got on the phone to a friend and he said, ‘I’m taking you to AA. You need to hang with me.’
“I did that. It took about 2 months after the bad thing happened, 2 months in the program to finally, after all the shit that I had done through my entire life as a boozer, say to myself, You are an alcoholic. It took me that long to admit it to myself. I spent the next year sober, dealing with demonic shit, all the things inside that made me self-medicate. And I’m doing this with nothing to fall back on. It was just me and my reflection. It was heavy.”
The separation, on the other hand, was an ice-cream cone with sprinkles by comparison, probably one of the most amicable you’ll ever hear about. His sobriety no doubt helped keep it that way. It was literally a case of two people who had been together for 12 years looking at each other and mutually deciding it was over. “We haven’t gotten an attorney or a mediator,” he says. “I just said to Rebecca, ‘Look, you have the house in the Valley, you have the beach house in Laguna, because one, you deserve it, and two, the kids are with you. I don’t have a problem with that. I want the mother of my kids to be of sound mind, spirit, soul, the whole thing.”
All he really needs, he says, is the place here in San Clemente, time with his kids, and some sweet waves, and he’s fine. “It’s funny, because in Hollywood, people say to my ex, ‘You gotta have a lawyer! He’s going to screw you!’ And she’s saying, ‘No, you don’t get it. Dom doesn’t really care about money.’ And I don’t. I don’t want to sound like I’m some kind of great guy. But I’ve never been materialistic. I’m here, I’m happy.”
A New Place
We take a walk down the hill to the beach. A sandy bike trail runs the length of the coast as far as you can see, along with a set of commuter-train tracks. As we walk toward the pier, a passenger train zips by. Three bikini-clad teenage girls on the beach run up and moon it.
“There you go,” Purcell says, arms outstretched. “Welcome to San Clemente.”
The waves are big enough here that when they crash, you feel it in your chest. A surfer catches one, and Purcell roots for him under his breath. “He made that drop. Awesome. There you go. Nice.” Purcell tells me he still has his surfer’s high from his own rides earlier today. Surfing has become his substitute addiction. In front of us, the San Clemente pier is alive with Sunday afternoon crowds. Not a frown in town.
“For people in beach towns, certainly in San Clemente, it’s really all about kicking back,” he says. “It’s all about enjoying life. We all like to surf; we all like to escape. I’ve always been drawn to the coast. Something about the ocean puts me at ease. If I’m gone long, I start getting tweaked out. But if I’m by the water, I start loosening up. Maybe it’s the horizon, you know? There’s nothing in my way.”
San Clemente is symbolic of the new life Purcell was forced to start after he separated from his wife. He purposely searched for a home here because of the legendary waves. He knew he’d find them, but he was a bit surprised by what else he found: “As soon as I moved here, I went to an AA meeting, and all these guys there were, like, ‘Whoa, it’s the dude from Prison Break.’ I was embraced immediately. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”
Now this core group of eight or nine guys is not just a support team, but a group of true friends. “All the guys I hang out with are hard-core dudes,” he says. “They’ve done some bad stuff in their lives. Some have spent time in jail. But you meet them and they’re just stand-up, straight-up guys. They’re at the point in their lives now where they’re all about family and being loyal to one another. I’ve never had that before. That’s the kind of positive influence I need right now.”
On the next page, Purcell talks about savoring the small stuff...
