New York acting icon Chris Noth grins and gripes about his tempestuous relationship with acting, celebrity and New York.
If you’re looking for a poster kid for New York, look no fur- ther than Chris Noth.
The Greenwich Village resident may have been born in Wisconsin, but his resume was reared right here on the streets of the city. Two of our town’s most iconic television series, Sex and the City and Law & Order owe a huge amount of their success to his acting. He can often be seen hoofing it to one of his many theater gigs where he continues to hone his craft, or strolling into a neighborhood watering hole to relax and take the edge off.
“I know I get a little grouchy when I’m weaving through a sea of tourists with their cameras looking for a snapshot of the guy from Sex and the City, but there aren’t many places where I get the kind of energy and opportunities that I’ve had right here in New York.”
The 57-year-old Big Apple denizen has an edge that screams New York. He’s like every streetwise city dweller Hollywood has romanticized on the silver screen. He’s Dustin Hoffman slapping the hood of a taxi in Midnight Cowboy and screaming “I’m walking here!!”
“Look, I love it here,” he says. “It just gets a little hard to find your own space sometimes.” For Noth, whom many think of as the elegant publishing magnate who melted women’s hearts on SATC, that space is The Cutting Room, the rock palace of which he has a piece. It’s his haven, bursting with bands that strike a chord with well-heeled rockers. But even here he can belt out the blues.
“This is our second location,” he says. “It’s a fantastic place, but as New York morphs more into a cleaner, more corporate city, you’ll find more Banks of America than cool places like this.”
If Noth seems a bit nostalgic, it’s understandable, since he developed his taste for the Big Apple back in the bad old days before the Giuliani cleanup of the early ’90s. “Those were the days when a struggling actor could live in Manhattan. Hell, I remember riding my bike through the snow with my girlfriend on the handle bars. But, now that I think of it, my bike got stolen—so there were definite trade-offs…”
If you would like to continue reading the entire story written by Mike Hammer and see all the photographs of Chris Noth by Brian Bowen Smith, click here.
