Danny Trejo knows he’s being watched. Glancing over his shoulder, the 79-year-old flashes a wide, toothy smile at the women a couple of tables down from us who’ve just clocked the presence of the baddest of all badasses. ‘No way!’ they exhale in unison. Trejo turns back to me, still grinning, and digs a tortilla chip into a mound of guacamole studded with pistachios. ‘Someone once told me I was the most recognisable Latino in the world,’ he says. ‘I went, wait, am I ugly or what?’ He erupts into a throaty laugh that reverberates like gravel in a cement mixer, then shakes his head. ‘Nah, you’ve just been in a lot of movies, holmes.’

To be fair, it’s hard to stay incognito when your face is plastered all over the walls. We’re having lunch at Trejo’s Cantina, a bright, colourful taco joint in the heart of Hollywood, with a full bar and a recurring motif in its choice of artwork. Trejo’s moustachioed mug stares out from hot-sauce bottles, staff T-shirts and the sign above the door. In the toilets, murals depict just some of his more than 400 film, television and video game roles: thrusting open a trench coat full of blades as Mex-ploitation action hero Machete, taking the mic in From Dusk Till Dawn, his severed head riding across the desert on a tortoise in Breaking Bad. If you didn’t recognise Danny Trejo in this place, you never would.

The quintessential screen tough guy opened his first taqueria a few miles south of here on La Brea Avenue in 2016, and now has five Trejo’s Tacos locations dotted across Los Angeles. Next he has his sights set on London, specifically a prime spot on Portobello Road. He fell in love with the city a decade ago while shooting Muppets Most Wanted. ‘I stayed there for about four weeks,’ he remembers. ‘Me and Ray Liotta walked all over. It was a joy. People are so friendly, especially because me and Ray are pretty recognisable. We went to see Buckingham Palace and were complete tourists. But both me and Ray said: “They need some Mexican food here!”’

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Glancing around at his surroundings, it isn’t hard to see why LaKeith Stanfield might, as he puts it, ‘feel adrift in history’. We’re sitting on wooden chairs in a cottage on the grounds of a Pasadena hotel that dates back to the Gilded Age. Stanfield has been living here for the past few weeks while he remodels his nearby home to mimic its rustic aesthetic: exposed oak beams, heavy velvet curtains, wrought iron pokers beside the fireplace. ‘I like feeling like I’m in a different time,’ he says. ‘That’s how this hotel makes me feel.’ It is, he says, his hideaway from the modern world. ‘I’m trying to find a hole and stay there,’ he smiles. ‘Especially these days, I’m really enjoying the things that matter, like family. Building my family and having those moments of sacredness is really important.’

Let’s bear with him for a moment, shall we? ‘I don’t know if it’s start-middle-end,’ he muses, his voice low and languid. ‘I view it as a revolution in a circle, a neverending loop.’ The 31-year-old (at least by conventional calendars) found himself pondering this concept on the set of his spooky new Disney movie, Haunted Mansion. ‘If you think about it like that, technically we’re ghosts,’ he continues. ‘The question is: do you want to be a good ghost or a bad ghost? You’re in someone’s dream right now, and you’re either haunting it or making it more pleasurable. My thing is: let’s make people’s dreams a little bit more fun and cooler, make them feel good if we can.’

Over the past decade Stanfield has established himself as the most compelling, charismatic and idiosyncratic actor of his generation. His lethargic charisma is endlessly malleable, allowing him to drift through time to play an Old West outlaw in The Harder They Fall or a 1960s FBI informant in Judas and the Black Messiah (earning an Oscar nomination in the process). He is best known, though, as the otherworldly Darius, who spent four seasons of Atlanta as the trippiest, most heartfelt character on television.

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Beauty? For Lisa Rinna, the secret to beauty is simple. ‘Find out what makes you happy, and do that,’ she says sagely. We’re sitting by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, beneath towering palm trees and clear blue LA skies. She sips her iced tea and looks at me through the yellowy tint of her oversized Tom Ford shades. ‘Listen,’ she drawls, ‘I don’t care how much work you have done, if you’re a fucking miserable cunt… nothing’s gonna help you, honey!’

Rinna’s laugh is loud, uproarious and dirty. As fans of her brash, outspoken tenure on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills might expect, she is outrageously good company. Today she’s casually chic in a figure-hugging black Éterne dress, Givenchy slides, black-and-white Valentino bucket hat and the aforementioned Tom Fords, and has never been happier. At 59, she is suddenly the talk of the fashion world. In January, not long after announcing her departure from Housewives after eight years, luxury brand Kenzo got in touch to ask whether she’d like to sit front row at its Paris Fashion Week show. ‘I guess because it was covered so tremendously, people saw I was there and started asking me to come to different things,’ says Rinna, who ended up popping up everywhere from Michael Kors at New York Fashion Week to Richard Quinn’s ‘mind-blowing’ show in London.

In Copenhagen, she walked the catwalk for Rotate Birger Christensen in a black bodysuit and cheetah-print fur coat. While leaving Housewives may have cleared her schedule, after so many years on the show it’s clearly still never too far from her mind. When I ask about the secret to her longevity in showbusiness — three-plus decades, booked and busy — she replies in a voice dripping with sarcasm: ‘I guess being the biggest bully in Hollywood has helped a great deal.’ She’s referring, of course, to Kathy Hilton’s infamous hot-tempered accusation during a Housewives reunion last year. Did that line bug her? ‘No, I wouldn’t say it bugs me,’ she replies with a smirk. ‘I just think that it’s really ironic coming out of her mouth!’ She cackles. ‘Projection is a real interesting thing on that show. We all do it. Actually, I thought it was pretty funny, to be honest with you.’

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Troye Sivan may be about to star in the most debauched new show on television, but in real life he likes to keep his nose clean. ‘I don’t do drugs, and I’m not a huge drinker either,’ the singer-turned-actor-turned-singer-again tells me over coffee and banana bread on an overcast morning in West Hollywood. The silver platters of cocaine racked up on-screen in HBO’s hotly anticipated The Idol just aren’t his style. In fact, until fairly recently Sivan thought he was too strait-laced even to go raving. ‘I realised kind of late at 25 — I’m 27 now — that I love going out,’ he says. ‘I assumed I wasn’t much of a partier because I don’t do drugs, but I am! I love partying. The right groove will make me go feral. I lose my mind.’

We’re sitting on the terrace at Great White, an Australian café where Sivan, who grew up in Perth and has a house in Melbourne, comes for a taste of home. He’s dressed down in a faded black Acne hoodie and beige cargo pants, but something about his tousled blonde hair and electric blue eyes can’t help but mark him out as an off-duty pop star. Right now he’s in the midst of a whirlwind schedule: after his ES Magazine photo shoot, he’s off to New York to shoot the cover for his as-yet-untitled third album, then he’s straight on to Berlin to make a music video and then to Cannes for the premiere of The Idol. ‘I have a very fun life,’ he says, idly using his fork to smear whipped butter over his banana bread. ‘It’s everything I could ever want.’

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What does Jeff Goldblum have in common with Dr Ian Malcolm, the silver-tongued, occasionally bare-chested mathematician he’s been playing for almost three decades in the Jurassic Park movies? For a start, they wear the same boots. The 69-year-old actor waggles his feet out from under our breakfast table at the Sunset Tower in Hollywood so I can admire the Saint Laurents he brought along from the latest instalment, Jurassic World Dominion. ‘I’ve broken these in,’ he recalls telling the costume department, explaining why he was putting them out of a job. ‘It makes me feel a whole different way if they’re new. I think Malcolm is broken in. He has a broken-in, uh, body experience.’

The same could be said of Goldblum, supremely at ease with himself and cutting a rakish figure this morning in an all-black ensemble topped with a wide-brimmed felt hat and those chunky Jeff-brand Jacques Marie Mage glasses. Their similarities extend well beyond a shared wardrobe. In 1993’s Jurassic Park, Richard Attenborough’s Dr John Hammond affectionately described Malcolm as suffering from a ‘deplorable excess of personality’ and Goldblum similarly bubbles over with effervescent charisma. He greets waiters and fellow diners like old friends. Even the menu thrills him. ‘I’d say the huevos rancheros might be entertaining,’ he purrs, as if the eggs might leap off the plate and start tap dancing. ‘And I think not unhealthy! What else do I need? Do you have fresh squeezed orange juice? Pulpy, that’s what I like. Otherwise I’m opposed to it.’

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Paris Jackson is tired of being told how normal she is.

World famous from the moment she was born, Michael Jackson’s only daughter says she has become accustomed to battling preconceived ideas about her character. ‘I’ve had more than a handful of people tell me, “Wow, when I met you I thought you were gonna be a bitch!”’ she says, the expletive barely past her lips before she starts trying to reel it back in. ‘Excuse my language. They’re like: “When I met you I thought you were gonna be a spoiled brat.” While that’s nice to hear, it’s also like, oh, people already think that before they even meet me. A lot of times I don’t have a chance to show people who I really am.’

Now aged 22, Jackson is taking her chance to show the world her true self — musically, at least. Her debut album, Wilted, is a collection of melancholy indie-folk inspired by the likes of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Californian band Grandaddy. While that may sound like a far cry from her father’s remarkable pop oeuvre, she counts his work among her influences, too. ‘I think he’ll always influence everything I do in some way, whether it’s subconscious or intentional,’ she reasons. ‘I was around that creativity all the time, so I’m sure I learnt a lot of what I have from that.’

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Mia Goth is wearing a fluorescent Valentino gown and white thigh-high boots as she watches the sun set over Los Angeles. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Lovell House, a masterpiece of modernist architecture and a film star in its own right after appearing in LA Confidential, she gazes over a hillside of swaying palms that slopes down towards the city, sprawling like an ocean. The scene couldn’t be more quintessentially Hollywood, but in her mind Goth is 5,500 miles away.

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