Hank Azaria sells Bel Air home, buys Dan Castellaneta’s Pacific Palisades “mini-mansion”

Hank Azaria has sold his Bel Air mansion and is downsizing to a Pacific Palisades property belonging to fellow Simpsons actor Dan Castellaneta.

According to property blog The Real Estalker, Azaria, who is the voice of Simpsons character Moe and used to play Phoebe’s love interest David in Friends, bought his new home from Castellaneta – the voice of Homer Simpson – for $5.5 million (£3.35 million).

Until now, Azaria and partner Katie Wright have been living in a seven-bedroom, ten-bathroom pad for which they paid $10 million (£6.09 million) back in March 2022. Stylishly decorated by Trip Haenisch, who also designed Courtney Cox’s rather fabulous home, the property has a large gym – Azaria is apparently a fitness fanatic – and a screening room.

In fact the colonial-style property, which lies at the end of an exclusive cul-de-sac and “hovers over the parking lot [of] the extremely hoity-toity Bel Air Country Club”, is so impressive that it graced the pages of August’s Architectural Digest.

But The Real Estalker reports that it received a call from an inside source last week revealing that Azaria, who also plays Apu and Chief Wiggum in the Simpsons, has sold up to a friend in order to move into Castellaneta’s 1920s ‘”mock-Tudor mini-mansion”.

The Real Estalker adds in typically tongue-in-cheek style: “Why did Mister Azaria opt for a new house almost half the size of this celebrity-style pad in Bel Air? We don’t know, so don’t anybody take the bother or breath to ask.”

According to property records, Dan Castellaneta and his wife Deb Lacusta paid $5.75 million (£3.5 million) for the four-bedroom property in 2019, but they decided to sell in April this year when they found their dream home, which they’ve bought for $5.7 million (£3.47 million), just a few blocks away.

If you’re worried about how Azaria, Wright and their son Hal will cope in their comparatively small new residence, don’t be: Azaria owns a veritable smorgasbord of rental properties in LA and New York City, so if the Pacific Palisades digs don’t prove satisfactory, they can always turf out a tenant and do a house swap (though with Azaria charging $16,000/£9,750 per month for his Soho loft, he might need to take on a new Simpsons character to make ends meet).

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