Gabriel Byrne moved away from Los Angeles because it was too sunny.

'The Usual Suspects' actor - who hails from Dublin, Ireland - moved to the US as his career took off and spent several years living in the heart of Hollywood - but he's admitted he's never really felt at home in the country and he decided to leave L.A. because of the year-round sunshine.

He told the Guardian newspaper: "I’ve never belonged here ... while it was lovely to reach out the window and pick an orange off a tree, and that every day the sun was shining, after a while that became suffocating, because there was no sense of time, and all anybody ever talked about was movies."

After leaving L.A., he spent time in New York before settling in Maine with his wife Hannah Beth King, and their daughter - and he admits he's much more content living away from the Hollywood spotlight.

He added: "People fish for lobster, and they make tables. I can live a very peaceful life here."

Byrne went on to express his bewilderment over the American preoccupation with happiness and self-help books.

He said: "There’s such an emphasis in America on happiness that the entire society feels sometimes to me has gone completely inward, and is fixated now on the self, and on all these billions of dollars of self-help books ... But the answer isn’t in self-help books. The answer is in facing ... the reality of life as it is, not how we would want it to be."