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How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Cary Elwes

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How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Cary Elwes

Cary Elwes may not have been born in Los Angeles, but it’s probably fair to consider the native Brit an honorary Angeleno. The “Princess Bride” star was born in and spent his formative years kicking around London; he moved to L.A. in 1990, on his brother’s recommendation. He met his wife, photographer Lisa Marie Kurbikoff, at a cookoff in Malibu about a year later and the two married in 2000. A daughter, Dominique, arrived in 2007.

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In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

Elwes has spent his years in California not just establishing his family life, but also further enmeshing himself in Hollywood. He’s appeared in everything from “Saw” to “Ella Enchanted,” and played a corrupt government agent in a couple of “Mission Impossible” movies. His latest role is as a former cop turned private detective in Peacock’s new crime thriller, “M.I.A.,” streaming now.

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“I’ve been out here for quite a bit now and while [2025’s] fires were pretty devastating — changing a lot of the landscape and people’s lives in ways that none of us could have imagined — I’m hopeful,” Elwes says. “I feel like we’re going to build back stronger and better. Things can seem dark sometimes, but I still have a spark of hope in my heart.”

Here’s how Elwes would spend his perfect, hopeful Sunday in Los Angeles.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

10 a.m.: Coffee and a chat

We wake up around 10 a.m., which is kind of late for me. Then we’ll have our coffee. I tend to lean toward Gelson’s beans, which I find have a particular flavor I tend to like. I do like my coffee. It’s probably the only addiction I really have.

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Anyway, after I finish up my coffee, I’ll typically ask my wife and daughter what they’d like to do for the day. My daughter is 19, and she’s terrific. I always tell my wife she’s the best production we’ll ever do together.

Noon: Leisurely lunch

My wife is very fond of this Italian restaurant in Woodland Hills called Casaléna. It’s right off Ventura Boulevard and it’s terrific. Even their salads are extraordinary. It’s fairly new, too, but it’s always booked out solid so you really have to make a reservation in advance. Luckily, my wife and daughter are organized, so if they want to go there, they’ll have planned ahead.

2 p.m.: Head to the movies

We like to go see movies at the Imax at Universal CityWalk. The quality of that theater is very, very good and seeing films on the biggest screen possible is important to us.

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My wife and I went on a date to see “Michael” in Imax, which was sold out and it was phenomenal. Antoine Fuqua did a great job and our friend Colman [Domingo] was honestly transformative as Joe Jackson. And Jaafar Jackson, who’s Michael’s nephew, is remarkable. It’s an extraordinary film, but sold out with people cheering and dancing? That made it a phenomenon. People were interacting with the movie as it played and it was remarkable.

If we’re not interested in whatever’s playing at the time, we might go for a hike in Tapia Park. I grew up watching “MASH” as a kid and when I realized they filmed there, I thought “How blessed am I to be living just a few miles from where such an iconic series was made?”

It’s a really beautiful park too. If you take a long hike, you’ll see waterfalls and lots of wildlife. On a nice afternoon, taking the dog out there for a walk? You can’t beat it.

There’s so much rich history here. I remember going on the Universal Studio Tour for the first time when I visited L.A. as a kid. They had a thing where they’d pick a couple of tour guests and the guide would put you on camera in front of a blue screen and you’d reenact a scene from a movie. The tour also took you by the “Jaws” shark coming out of the water and through an old western town, and I found out years later that a director friend of mine had been making westerns there when I was a kid and I didn’t even know it.

That tour was fantastic. With parting the sea for “The Ten Commandments” and then the boulders coming down the hill during the rockslide? Absolutely magnificent.

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5 p.m.: Pick a Getty, any Getty

Depending on what time our movie ends or if we just end up going for a walk instead, we might go over to the Getty Center. We love it there. Usually we’ll go in the afternoon — maybe we’ll have a late lunch up there — and sometimes we’ll go to the Getty Villa instead, which luckily survived the Palisades fire.

We just love being around art. We’ll walk through the entire collection, plus whatever exhibit they have on at the time. We’ll go to LACMA sometimes, too, or even the Academy Museum to see whatever new exhibits they have.

Culturally, we really try to keep busy. Sometimes we’ll want to sit at home and play Spite and Malice or watch a show on TV, but mostly I try to go out and encourage my family to do the same, especially because we live in such a wonderfully diverse, cultural city.

7 p.m.: Taco time

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I always leave meal decisions up to the girls, and sometimes they like to go out and get tacos. We like the fish tacos at Escuela. It’s pretty close to Quentin Tarantino’s movie theater, the New Beverly Cinema, which we like to go to as well. I took my daughter to see “Jaws” there, in fact, which she loved.

9 p.m.: More movies

I’m trying to educate my daughter in the films and TV shows that I watched growing up. She’s taking a film history class in school. She wants to be an actor as well, so I want her to have an understanding of the history of film and history of performance, so I show her the great performances that inspired me as a kid and encourage her in that way.

When I grew up in England, we literally had two channels, both in black and white. Young people can’t quite wrap their heads around that now, but it really did make you pay attention because you had to be sitting in front of the television to catch a show or movie you wanted to watch.

I remember that the BBC, particularly on weekends, would have matinee screenings of movies. We actually had pretty good quality TV in England growing up, but they’d also heavily focus on British films from the ‘40s all the way through to the ‘60s so I got my education from that particular style of films, like the postwar films, ‘50s films, and the Ealing comedies. David Lean and Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson … a lot of the films they were in or directed really helped shape who I am today.

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Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers had a very strong influence on me as a kid, too, so I really want to try to share with my daughter why these films meant so much to me.

10:30 p.m.: Books in bed

I’m not really a late-night person anymore. I used to be when I was a kid, but now, unless we’re out on a date, my wife and I are homebodies.

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Did you know? Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand were close friends

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Did you know? Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand were close friends

Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand are pictured in the Oval Office on Sept. 4, 1974, after Greenspan’s swearing in as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.

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One of the most important intellectual relationships in the life of Alan Greenspan, the prominent former central banker who died Monday, was with author Ayn Rand, whose 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged has become a perennial favorite among conservatives and which the Library of Congress named as one of the books that has shaped America.

The two first met when he was in his mid-twenties and she was in her forties, and already well-established via her 1943 novel The Fountainhead, which had been a best-seller. They were introduced through Greenspan’s then-wife, the Canadian art historian Joan Mitchell. Mitchell was a close friend of the wife of Nathaniel Branden. Branden was Rand’s protege and longtime lover.

Greenspan and Mitchell wed in 1952, but divorced within a year. By contrast, Greenspan’s relationship with Rand was far more lasting: they remained friends until her death in 1982.

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Through the Branden connection, Greenspan joined Rand’s “Collective,” a small group of friends and thinkers who would gather regularly at Rand’s midtown Manhattan apartment to discuss politics, world events and ideas. He became a Collective regular.

According to Greenspan’s 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, Rand nicknamed Greenspan “the undertaker” early on in their friendship, thanks to his penchant for dark suits and his sober demeanor.

His dour reputation was at odds with his early artistic pursuits. He was a talented musician. Before pursuing an economics degree at New York University, he enrolled at Juilliard to study clarinet, and as a teenager played in a swing band alongside jazz legend-to-be Stan Getz. His musical tastes were just as conservative as his politics, however: in his memoir, he dismissed almost every form of post-big band popular music as “on the edge of noise.”

Greenspan wrote for Rand’s magazine, The Objectivist, including contributing an influential essay on the gold standard in 1966 that was later reprinted in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. When he was sworn in as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Ford administration, it was Rand who stood with him, along with Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor, and Greenspan’s mother Rose Goldsmith.

“Ayn Rand became a stabilizing force in my life,” he wrote in his memoir. “She was a wholly original thinker, sharply analytical, strong-willed, highly principled, and very insistent on rationality as the highest value. In that regard, our values were congruent – we agreed on the importance of mathematics and intellectual rigor.”

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Frame: From Scandal to $300 Million in Sales

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Frame: From Scandal to 0 Million in Sales
The premium denim label, with the DNA of ‘a Frenchman coming to Los Angeles in the Seventies,’ is on track to hit a major revenue milestone and open a 6,000-square-foot Paris flagship this year, after successfully steering clear of the messy breakup between co-founder Erik Torstensson and venture capitalist Natalie Massenet.
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Laverne Cox wrote her memoir because ‘one more human story out there can help’

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Laverne Cox wrote her memoir because ‘one more human story out there can help’

Laverne Cox says that even from a young age, there was “always music in my head.” Her new memoir is called Transcendent. She’s shown above in New York in April 2026.

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For more than a decade, Laverne Cox has been one of the most visible trans women in America. But the Orange Is the New Black star says she spent most of her childhood in Mobile, Ala., keeping herself hidden.

A turning point came when she was in third grade, on a church field trip to Six Flags. She bought a paper fan to cool herself, and caught the attention of her teacher.

“I was having a Scarlett O’Hara moment, fanning myself,” Cox says. “And then later that day, my mother comes in and tells me she had gotten a call from the school … and [my teacher] said that I would end up in New Orleans wearing a dress if we didn’t get me into therapy right away.”

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When she was 8 or 9, Cox was sent to conversion therapy, where, she says, a therapist suggested injecting her with testosterone. “The idea was that that was supposed to make me more masculine,” she says. “My mother, thank God, said no to that.” But Cox knew she needed to leave Mobile.

In her new memoir, Transcendent, Cox writes about her journey from Mobile to show business. She remembers being bullied mercilessly by other children at school — a situation made worse by her mother’s reaction: “My mother … instead of having an impulse to protect me or care for me or ask if I was OK, she made it my fault,” she says.

In the 1990s, she moved to New York City and began auditioning for roles, first as a dancer and then as an actor. She also started experimenting with gender norms; she began her medical transition in 1998, at the age of 26.

For Cox, writing her memoir is an act of resistance and healing: “After 2023, it became very clear to me that we, that trans people had lost the culture,” she says. “I knew this was the beginning of a disaster in terms of policy. … The dehumanization was so clear to me, and so I think I also thought maybe one more human story out there can help.”

Interview highlights

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On the anger she still feels about being bullied as a child

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As an adult, I’m angry at the boys. I am angry at my mother. I want to protect that little child. I’m just so angry. I’m so hurt. … There’s also like the anger [about] all the kids that I’ve met who are trans or queer who are still experiencing this, and the anger of knowing that in states that have passed anti-trans laws that the percentage of bullying has skyrocketed in those states. … There’s the rhetorical piece that happens in the media that is dehumanizing and stigmatizing trans people. And it creates a permission structure. If, like your governor and your state legislators are doing [it], if your teachers and pundits on TV are doing it, then of course kids are emboldened to do it. And that makes me so angry.

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