Favorite Places To Visit

Paris. The first time I went, I was 14, promoting a film I did with Gérard Depardieu called My Father the Hero, which I rewatched recently with my kids, thinking it would be a fun, kid kind of movie… wow… it would not be made today. A very strange concept of a young girl pretending her father is her lover to impress an older boy… But! I went there to promote it and it blew my mind. I was the child who went to Disneyland Paris instead of the Louvre, but I made up for it by doing the cultural side as an adult. I promised my almost-12-year-old daughter that for one big birthday, maybe her 16th, I will take her to Paris, too.

Here in Utah. We live in a relatively secluded area, with not a lot of people around. There is a spot I hike to, where I can look out over the whole valley and the mountains, and it’s there I feel most content. We have five dogs, three cats, and then at our ranch down the road, horses, donkeys, goats, pigs and chickens. It’s pretty heavenly. How did we end up in Utah? I like the woods, I even like the weather, and it was always really convenient for me to get to from Los Angeles, so we started spending more and more time here, then decided to move.

There is a knitting store in New York City called Purl Soho and it’s like crack to me. I walk in and my heart flutters. There are rows and rows of beautiful yarns organised by colours and weight. It evokes so much creativity. I think the woman who owns it used to work for Martha Stewart – she has exquisite attention to detail.

New York. I grew up in Connecticut and travelled in and out for work from the age of nine, so it holds a lot of childhood memories. It feels like home in a way. It’s an incredibly exciting, vibrant, vital city, and, after moving to LA, which is very much a one-industry town, trips to New York felt like a relief. There are a million different industries, a million different passions and careers and people.

My go-to drink day to day is a Dirty Martini… well, not my day to day, unless it’s the first three months of lockdown when, actually, it probably was. But when I’m on holiday I want to drink whatever the area is known for, so in Paris it’s Champagne and in London I order gin cocktails.

My mother is my producing partner and manager so we often travel together. My grandfather emigrated from Germany in the 1920s, and during a press tour there, my mom really wanted to see the town where he was raised – Esslingen, close to Stuttgart. She was trying to find a recipe for potato salad the way my grandfather made it. We stepped into a café but my mother didn’t speak German – her father never spoke it at home – so she asked our waitress if she could translate, and we talked about the town, and they wrote down the recipe, which meant so much to her. I was probably the most stressed out I’ve ever been at the time. The film I was promoting wasn’t doing well. I wasn’t expecting anything from the trip, then we got there and it was such a meaningful experience. I’m so grateful I had it, because it defined the trip for me instead of that failing movie.

When I was doing Grey’s Anatomy, I travelled with my co-star TR Knight to Mexico. It was amazing. We were on a budget, because it was the first season of the show, so we bought a bunch of duty-free alcohol from the airport. We were so cheap, we would order virgin Piña Coladas and then spike them ourselves. Hey, whatever works!

To Punta Mita in Mexico. We go to a villa called Casa Tres Soles. The first time I went with my whole family, thinking, this is so extravagant and I don’t know that I’ve ever thrown down that much for a vacation. But it was worth it. I just want to sit by the pool with a book and have conversations and morning Margaritas with my mother. We have karaoke nights and amazing dinners.