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
Purcell’s life is remarkably simple these days. An average day goes like this: Wake up, surf, go to work on Prison Break till 8:30 p.m., hit the gym hard for 45 minutes, go to bed. On breaks from the show, he takes movie roles, including one in the upcoming Joel Schumacher thriller Creek. On weekends, he surfs and goes to his kids’ soccer games or has them over to his place. (He’s particularly jazzed about the soccer. Purcell’s great-great-grandfather was a captain for Scotland back in the day, and an uncle played for Liverpool.) Predictably, Purcell is that dad on the sidelines:
“That’s my boy!” he’ll crow. “Scored nine goals!”
That’s the extreme man rearing his shaved head, and Purcell knows it. He’s given a lot of thought to the concept of the alpha male, how the traits that drove him to succeed also brought him trouble. What’s interesting is that those very traits—competitiveness, the drive to succeed, to dominate, to conquer—are generally considered virtues in the male world. Aren’t we all encouraged to be more aggressive, go for what we want, and, by god, get things done?
“A lot of my close friends are world-class athletes,” Purcell says. “I know some of the best surfers in the world. And we all have a similar desire to succeed. With that desire to succeed, you have to have ruthlessness. You have to. You also have to have selfishness. As a young man, you allow that to be all-consuming. But I’ve realized that you must keep yourself aware and try to mellow out with that, because it doesn’t serve the people around you. Very alpha male, very driven, very ambitious—they’re good qualities, but they’re also qualities that can mess you up.”
But how does a man, any man—you, me, the other guy—mellow out the male need to succeed? Or at least rein it in enough so it can be controlled? Perhaps we can’t. Purcell couldn’t—“I took myself out of the game, big time”—but what he was able to do was channel his alpha male tendencies toward positive things: surfing, working, working out, teaching sports to his kids. Structure saved him.
“I think I’m going have ‘balance’ tattooed on my forearm,” he says, “because it’s a big word that keeps popping up for me. Finding balance and moderation is hard for me, because extremists can’t do anything in moderation. I can’t eat ice cream without eating a whole bucket. We self-medicate to take ourselves out of mundane reality or what we perceive to be mundane reality. It’s when you stop and look inside that you realize what you thought was mundane is actually not.”
Your Place
Back at Purcell’s condo, the conversation winds down. He prepares to visit his kids. He tells me he’s off for the next few days, so there will be serious surfing to do. His self-made lifestyle continues to be carved in stone as much as it can, because it can no longer be expected to form through instinct and desire alone. The good stuff, as Purcell calls it, requires effort.
“The big thing for me,” he says, “is to remember to be humble. I attribute all the good stuff to allowing myself to be humble and trying not to expect too much of myself. To just do the best I can. And it’s very hard to do that. It’s a muscle you have to exercise in your head. It’s like, ‘You know what? I can’t control everything. I’ve got to let it go.’” He smiles. “That’s what I’ve been working on.”
In a way, we all are. I certainly am, but I sometimes wonder how well. As I sit at the airport waiting to board the red-eye back to the East Coast, my second tall India Pale Ale sits in front of me as I watch the Red Sox play the Angels in the playoffs. Sitting next to me, former Mets pitcher and current TBS announcer Ron Darling nurses a Jack and Coke. Just one. For an hour and a half. He’s clearly one of those “normal” folks Purcell was talking about, doing his New York Times crossword and barely noticing the game, yet no less alpha. Pro ballplayers simply can’t be less alpha. So what makes him able to sit on one glass of go-go juice for so long? I don’t ask him. I just order another and ponder it.
