The turn toward the beach

Philip Levens had already flown into Tampa, driven through St. Petersburg and Sarasota, and worked his way down Florida’s Gulf Coast when the trip began to feel like a mistake. In a July 20, 2026, interview with Fox Business, he recalled thinking that this side of the state might not be what he and his wife, Carolyn Stotesbery-Levens, needed. Then he reached downtown Naples, took a right toward the water, and walked to the sand.

“I got out of the car,” he said. “I called my wife and I said, ‘This is where we’re going to live.’”

Carolyn Stotesbery-Levens was not in the car. She was on the other end of a FaceTime call, looking at the beach and the city through his phone. “He just had a sparkle in his eye,” she told Fox Business. He showed her the architecture and the colors. “It just really called to us.”

Not long after that drive, the couple purchased a home in Naples, ending more than two decades in California. The move is now part of their public story, and it is the clearest recent chapter in the life they have built since their 2019 wedding.

Two Hollywood careers, one decision

Philip Levens is a television writer, producer, and showrunner, raised in Lubbock, Texas, and trained at the University of Texas at Austin. He created and ran the Syfy limited series Ascension and has written and produced Smallville, South Beach, Knight Rider, and other series. Carolyn Stotesbery-Levens is an actor, writer, producer, and acting coach, born in Minneapolis, who has appeared in Love & Mercy, Grey Lady, Agent X, and Castle, and who has sold her own television pilots.

Los Angeles is where those careers were made. It is also a city the two of them eventually decided to leave. In the same Fox Business feature, Carolyn Stotesbery-Levens said the state’s East Coast had felt like too much hustle for the life they wanted, and that peacefulness was a large part of what she valued in a day-to-day routine. Naples, she said, put them at ease. Philip compared the look of downtown Naples to Beverly Hills — the architecture struck him immediately — but noted that the city around it felt different: cleaner, quieter, and set between the water and the open land rather than inside a vast metropolis.

They were not trying to retire. They were trying to change the setting in which the work continued.

What they carried south

A showrunner’s job and a writer’s job can travel. So can an acting coach’s. Carolyn Stotesbery-Levens already teaches students through Red Carpet Acting Studio and her online course, The Secret to Acting, work that does not depend on a Los Angeles address. Philip Levens’s recent interviews, including a 2025 conversation on the Ego Was Here podcast, have focused on the same concerns that occupied him in California: how stories get made, how a writer stays inside the industry, and how to keep going. Naples is a change of landscape, not a change of occupation.

The couple’s professional sites have begun to reflect the move. Philip’s homepage now lists Los Angeles and Naples together. Public biographies that still place Philip Levens and Carolyn Stotesbery-Levens only in Los Angeles are simply out of date.

“Fortune smiles on the bold”

Friends, Philip admitted, asked the obvious question: why leave. The distance is some three thousand miles. “It’s a difficult move,” he told Fox Business, “but I would say just do it. Fortune smiles on the bold. Just make the move and things will fall into place the way you need them to.”

Carolyn Stotesbery-Levens put the same idea in her own words. “There’s always a reason to talk yourself out of something like this,” she said. “But when you decide, ‘I want to change, I want a new lifestyle, this isn’t working for me anymore,’ and you stop procrastinating and move past that fear and that anxiety, it’s so worth it.”

Their real-estate agent, Compass’s Madeline Tracy, a Naples native, used the couple as an example of the point she now makes to other clients: come and walk the neighborhoods before you decide. The house, she said, can be changed. The daily life of the city cannot.

For readers who know Philip Levens as the writer of Smallville or the creator of Ascension, and who know Carolyn Stotesbery-Levens from Castle or Love & Mercy, the Naples chapter is not a footnote. It is where the two of them have chosen to live and to keep working. The call from the beach was the beginning. The work, as ever, is what comes next.