Actress Katherine Waterston on the Iconic Great Jones Cafe

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Katherine Waterston for AnOther Magazine A/W15Photography by Rachel Chandler

The star of the new Steve Jobs movie waxes lyrical about the legendary NoHo bar, once frequented by Basquiat and Don DeLillo

“There are things you can’t fake. At Great Jones Cafe you feel the history. It’s on the street where Basquiat lived and where Don DeLillo set his novel, Great Jones Street. It’s got an amazing vinyl jukebox. New Yorkers’ apartments are so small, these places become our living rooms. I’ve had remarkable and unremarkable dates at Great Jones,

I celebrated here when I got Inherent Vice. Lauren Hutton said she used to live near Great Jones – her doormen were crackheads and they’d rate her outfits: ‘Looking good today, Miss Hutton!’ It was rough, but there was a community. Right now, there’s elitist preservation going on. The city doesn’t understand that the dives have as much value as museums uptown. What I loved about Joaquin in Inherent Vice is that he’s in this rough-and-tumble world but has a kind spirit. That’s how you feel in Great Jones Cafe.”

"New Yorkers’ apartments are so small, places like Grand Jones Cafe become our living rooms"

Katherine Waterston was bewitching as Shasta Fay Hepworth in Paul Thomas Anderson’s psychedelic noir, Inherent Vice. The lost girl in trouble whose appearance plunges Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc into a tangled underworld of heroin smugglers, FBI informants and biker gangs, her deep-waters screen presence was the perfect foil to Phoenix’s befuddled private eye. “When in doubt, I listened to the Nina Simone and Janis Joplin versions of Little Girl Blue,” she says. “It was that feeling of Shasta being stuck in purgatory: her dreams of Hollywood hadn’t panned out, and she was out of ideas.” This autumn, the actress stars opposite Michael Fassbender in Danny Boyle's drama, Steve Jobs, out now. 

This article appears in the A/W15 edition of AnOther Magazine.