A native Angeleno, Stewart grew up in the San Fernando Valley and moved to LA’s Eastside when she was 20. “I absolutely f**king love this city,” she insists. “There’s a kind of unified dissonance because it’s not really a city as much as a cluster of neighborhoods, but there’s unity in that. I like the spaciousness. You can decide how you want to fill it.” Asked if she’d ever consider abandoning Tinseltown for the mean streets of New York City, the actor demurs. “LA gets a bad rap for being unserious, but there’s so much art and culture here. I find something a little heavy about the East Coast. When I come back to LA, I can breathe.”
Still, Stewart has no illusions about the problems facing Los Angeles and indeed most major cities in our country. She is indefatigable in her championing of the Downtown Women’s Center, an organization founded in 1978 that was the first in the U.S. to provide permanent supportive housing to homeless women—a mission it continues to pursue to this day, in addition to a health clinic that exclusively serves women in LA’s Skid Row community and a drop-in day center, where women can receive three daily meals and access to showers, restrooms, mail, laundry, and telephones. “LA is drowning in inadequacy in our response to homelessness. The city is at odds with itself,” Stewart laments. “There has to be a way to unearth a tender, empathetic approach to getting people off the streets. I wanted to align myself with an organization and people who’ve been doing this work for decades at a grass roots level. Amy [Turk, Chief Executive Officer of DWC] spends every waking hour helping these women. I’ll do anything for her.”
Stewart wears a Tom Ford suit and belt, Chanel bralette, and necklaces and rings by Hoorsenbuhs.
Reflecting on the future of the Highland Theatre, the film industry, and the city at large, Stewart remains optimistic yet emphatic: “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. And we can’t turn our backs on the people who are most in need.”
