Kristen Stewart at Highland Theatre
“Making films is a political act,” says Kristen Stewart. “You have to decide how you want to wield your presence and your voice.” These days, she is making hers heard at Highland Theatre—the 1925 Eastside movie palace and onetime vaudeville performance space, designed by noted architect Lewis Arthur Smith. Stewart recently purchased the noble yet dilapidated building, which closed its doors and dimmed its marquee in 2024. Beyond the walls and drop ceilings of past renovations, however, its original bones remain, including an extraordinary mezzanine (shown) and stage. Resurrecting the space will require a herculean effort. “It’s going to take a lot of people who care,” says Stewart, who is determined to recapture the glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age while positing a new kind of social cinema experience. “This project is about creating a new school and restructuring our processes. We want to make it a family affair, something for the community. It’s not just for pretentious Hollywood cinephiles.” Reflecting on the future of the theater and the film industry at large, Stewart notes, “The narrow path that’s been forged has to be broadened, not by tokenized diversity but by doing things really differently. We can’t keep making the same movie over and over again.” —Mayer Rus
Becky G at Olvera Street
“I have 200 percent pride in where I’m from,” proclaims music sensation Becky G, a.k.a. Rebbeca Marie Gomez. “One hundred percent pride in LA, where I was born and raised in Inglewood, and 100 percent pride in my Mexican heritage. Fifty-fifty just doesn’t cut it.” The singer’s resolute cultural identity—eloquently captured in the 2025 documentary Rebbeca—finds nourishment at historic Olvera Street, a pedestrian thoroughfare that traces its roots to the city’s founding by Los Angeles pobladores in the late 18th century. Today, Olvera Street is a popular tourist destination and cultural hub, abounding in authentic cuisine and indigenous crafts. Its treasures include the 1818 Ávila Adobe, the oldest standing residence in the city, and artist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 1932 fresco América Tropical, a landmark of the Mexican muralism movement. “Coming here really grounds me—the history, the energy, the family vibes,” the singer says. “The air is electric.” —M.R.
Chris Paul at Highland Park Bowl
Like Proust’s madeleine, the smell of burgers and fries transports NBA superstar Chris Paul to the smoke-filled bowling alleys of his youth in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “My father was in bowling leagues. The sport has been a love of mine all my life,” says the future Hall of Fame point guard. More than just a weekend baller—he founded a team in the Professional Bowlers Association in 2012 and has hosted a slew of celebrity tournaments—Paul marvels at the history embedded in Highland Park Bowl, a time capsule of Prohibition-era LA nightlife. Built in 1927, the venue reopened in 2016 after a painstaking restoration of its Spanish Revival façade, bow truss ceilings, 1930s forest murals, and quasi-steampunk pinsetters. “Everyone is welcome at the bowling alley,” Paul says of the sport’s appeal. “You don’t have to be a certain age or gender, and you don’t have to be the best to have a good time.” His highest score currently stands at 256, but, as basketball diehards know all too well, never count CP3 out: “I will get to 300!” —M.R.
Noah Wyle at Craft Contemporary
“I spent most of my childhood in this building,” says Noah Wyle, seated at Craft Contemporary, the museum founded by his grandmother, artist Edith R. Wyle, in 1973. Growing up, the actor would idle away hours here, watching her work, gazing out at the La Brea Tar Pits from a dormer window, or manning the gift shop. “The memories come back like torrents.” But as the Emmy-winning star of The Pitt reflects, the organization—set inside a neo-Georgian edifice on Wilshire Boulevard—is just as meaningful to him in terms of its cultural significance to Los Angeles. Originally called The Egg and The Eye, the space got its start in 1965 as a restaurant and gallery before his grandmother sought nonprofit status. Its mission has remained steadfast: to make craft and folk art available to, and reflective of, the city’s diverse population. “My grandmother really felt that art should be a democratic thing,” explains Wyle. Craft Contemporary, he notes, “is a meeting place where people can come and talk, share ideas, debate ideas, and experience other cultures.” —Sam Cochran
Lisa Kudrow at Warner Bros. Studios
If the Los Angeles metroplex is one big temple to the art of film and television, the Warner Bros. Studios lot in Burbank is its sanctum sanctorum. For Lisa Kudrow, the historic campus, founded in the late 1920s and sprawling over more than 60 acres, is something of a second home, the place where she shot 10 seasons of the cherished TV series Friends. “I love reading the plaques that list all the shows and movies that were filmed on the soundstages. I get surprisingly emotional,” says the LA native. The plate affixed to Stage 10—where she recently wrapped the third season of her indelible comic masterpiece The Comeback—boasts a roster of landmark films that would make any true cineast swoon. (The list includes Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, Giant, Dial M for Murder, and Now, Voyager, her late mother’s favorite movie.) “I don’t know if Warner Bros. is just special to me or to everyone in this industry,” Kudrow muses. “Things are always changing in our business. Whoever becomes the next guardian of this place, just please don’t cut down Jack Warner’s roses.” —M.R.
Mindy Kaling at The Original Farmer's Market
A self-professed “jelly donut snob” and “candy fiend,” actor-writer-producer Mindy Kaling makes a beeline to The Original Farmers Market at Fairfax Avenue and West 3rd Street whenever she needs a fix of the good stuff. A true LA institution, the market began life in 1934 as a hub for local farmers to sell produce from the backs of their trucks; its popularity quickly led to an agglomeration of permanent stalls and restaurants, much like its present form. “I started coming here when I first moved to California,” says Kaling, recalling her early, isolated days as an Angeleno. “I had my first donut here with my friend B.J. Novak, when we were working together on The Office.” Roughly two decades later, she still makes regular visits, bringing her three young children to favorite spots like Bob’s Coffee & Doughnuts, the French gourmet market Monsieur Marcel, the Magic Nut and Candy Co., and Singapore’s Banana Leaf restaurant. “In Massachusetts, where I grew up, a farmers market was something you did on a Sunday in the summer,” she says. “Here, you can go to the Farmers Market any day of the year. It’s so unpretentious and festive—and it’s never freezing. This is where my heart is.” —M.R.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt at Caltech
“Los Angeles is often thought of just as this place of show business and glitz and glamour,” muses Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who was born and raised in the City of Angels, his parents both public-radio journalists. “Fewer people know that Caltech, right here, is one of the preeminent hubs of science and technology in the world.” Since its official founding in 1920 as a successor to Pasadena’s Throop University, the campus has served as a breeding ground for Nobel Prize winners and an incubator for historic innovations, among them the Richter scale, antiretroviral therapies, and the discovery of gravitational waves. (It’s also an architectural tour de force, with an original master plan by Bertram Goodhue, Spanish Colonial Revival buildings, and modernist marvels like the 1967 Flewelling & Moody–designed Millikan Library, now Caltech Hall, shown.) “Americans would not have gone to the moon if it hadn’t been for the work done here,” he says, referring to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a partnership with NASA since 1958. “So don’t think that we Angelenos are just a bunch of pretty faces. We get some thinking done too.” That research, Gordon-Levitt notes, is now more important than ever. “We’re living in a time when science is being denigrated at the highest levels, so let’s celebrate it,” he says. “Caltech affirms the best of what humanity has to offer.” –S.C.
Ali Wong at Bistro Na's
“Many Chinese restaurants, even ones with great food, don’t give a shit about ambience,” actor-comedian Ali Wong avers. “You get fluorescent lights and a pink tablecloth, which has its own vibe. Bistro Na’s is something else.” A monument to haute Chinese cuisine tucked discreetly in a strip mall in the San Gabriel Valley, Wong’s go-to eatery for celebrating birthdays and impressing out-of-towners specializes in imperial Manchu delicacies dating back to the Qing Dynasty, all prepared by acclaimed chef Tian Yong and served in a quietly luxurious setting redolent of Chinese history. “You feel transported into another world at Bistro Na’s,” Wong says. “My dad is Cantonese, and I grew up in San Francisco eating mostly Cantonese food. My mom is such a hater, and even she loves it here.” Six years after the COVID pandemic upended daily life, the hospitality industry in LA is still struggling to regain its footing. “So many of my favorite restaurants have gone out of business. We can’t let that happen,” the actor laments. “I have so much gratitude for what immigrant communities have contributed to LA.” —M.R.
Lucy and Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman at The Egyptian Theatre
For this family of actors, there’s no place like the movies. “Going to the theater together, that was a huge part of our lives growing up,” says Lucy DeVito, like her parents, still in awe of the silver screen. “You’re just in it. It’s great to watch a film the way it’s meant to be watched.” These days, the DeVito-Perlman crew (which includes her siblings, Jake, a producer, and Gracie, an artist) makes a point to keep that tradition alive—whether here at The Egyptian, birthplace of the red-carpet premiere; its 1920s neighbors the Chinese and El Capitan; or any number of other citywide treasures. “When you live in Hollywood, your local theater is not just any old theater,” reflects Perlman, citing the Eastside’s Vista (1923) and Los Feliz 3 (1935) and West Side’s Aero (1939) and Fox (1930) as historic examples. Whatever the space, Danny notes, “going to the movies, that’s a deep, deep experience—when the joke scores and you have hundreds of people laughing at the same time. Everyone should know that.” In fact, the industry depends on it. “So much of our city was built on Hollywood, so many people are connected to the business—it feels good to support our peers,” says Lucy. Asks her mom, “What’s playing tonight?” —S.C.
Megan Stalter at Marriage Skate Shop
Megan Stalter isn’t much of a skateboarder. In fact, the actor-comedian (best known for her role on Hacks) describes herself as “kind of clumsy.” Still, one of her favorite spots in Los Angeles is Marriage, an Echo Park skate shop co-owned by Stalter’s fashion stylist Kat Typaldos and Typaldos’s husband, Ronnie Campone. “I have a sentimental connection to this space. It’s more than just decks and hoodies. It’s a real community spot,” she says. In addition to its array of groovy skater merch, Marriage also hosts adoption days for shelter dogs, reflecting the proprietors’ ongoing support for the vital work of LA Animal Services. Stalter is passionate about dogs, too. Her own rescue, Bunny, has been indispensable in easing the actor into showbiz life in LA. “We both have a lot of love and a lot of anxiety,” she confesses. “I moved here five years ago, during the COVID pandemic, and the city was lonely and scary. Now it’s amazing. It’s heaven.” —M.R.
This story appears in the March issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
