A New Kind of TV Woman
Sarah Jessica Parker wasn’t sure she wanted
to commit to a TV series. But she agreed to
meet with Darren Star in March of 1997 at
E.A.T., a restaurant on the Upper East Side
owned by Eli Zabar. Its bagels, sandwiches,
and matzo ball soup are legendary. As
Parker and Star lunched, he told her that
when he wrote the script, he heard Carrie in
Parker’s voice. She didn’t hear it herself, but
she was flattered and delighted. She did find
the script compelling—seductive, even. She
had never read anything like it. And her
agent loved it.
She had conditions, however, for consid-
ering the role. She didn’t want Carrie to
throw around the word “f---” just because
the show was on cable. She hoped Carrie
would be thoughtful about language, given
her profession as a writer. No problem, Star
told her. She had [another] concern: the sex
part ofSex and the City. “I just don’t see that
it’s important,” she said of doing nudity.
“But we should have that conversation.”
Star assured her neither he nor HBO
would require her to do anything she didn’t
want to. “If you want to wear a bra and roll
around in bed with somebody, and that’s what
makes you comfortable, then that’s what
you shall do,” Parker recalls Star saying.
After the lunch with Star, Parker dis-
cussed the project with [her then-fiancé
Matthew] Broderick, as well as her oldest
brother and her agent. They all reacted the
same: “You have to do
this.” She worried if she
did TV, she wouldn’t
be able to do plays and
movies—her career had
allowed her a variety
of challenges up until
this point. But everyone
she consulted insisted
Sex and the City was the
right path.
Finally, Parker relented.
But she was starring on
Broadway as Princess
Winnifred inOnce Upon a
Mattress and was about to
get married. She and Broderick would need
time to have their wedding, and then she
wanted to finish the final two weeks of the
play before filming began.
TheSex and the City pilot started shoot-
ing early in the morning on Tuesday, June 2,
1997—two days after the last performance
of Parker’s play.
Before then, Star would have to find his
Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha.Making Miranda
Casting the part of Miranda Hobbes, one of
Carrie’s three friends, proved tricky in
other ways. Star swiped the character’s
name from one of the many cynical women
featured in [Candace] Bushnell’s columns,
but he elaborated from there, making her
a career-focused lawyer who appears
to have given up on love. But Miranda’scharacterization as the “smart one” meant,
in Hollywood code, the “not pretty one,”
which, in Hollywood, didn’t appeal to every
candidate for the part.
Respected actor Cynthia Nixon, however,
didn’t harbor such vanity. Nixon, thirty-one
at the time, had her share of conventional
beauty—strawberry blonde hair, translu-
cent pale skin, gray-blue eyes. But of the
Miranda role, she said, “I was excited about
playing somebody who was so angry, bitter,
and cynical because, having been a child
actor with long blond hair, I was always
playing sweet, waiflike, hippie characters. It
was nice to grow out of that.”
She’d go on to attend Barnard College. In
1984, while a freshman, she appeared in two
Broadway plays at the same time,Hurly-
burly andThe Real Thing, a likely Broadway
first. After graduation from Barnard in 1988
(along with futureGilmore Girls actress
Lauren Graham), she returned to Broadway
in Wendy Wasserstein’sThe Heidi Chronicles
and Tony Kushner’sAngels in America: Mil-
lennium Approaches andAngels in America:
Perestroika. She scored her first Tony nomi-
nation as part of the original cast of Jean
Cocteau’sIndiscretions in 1995. A theater
nerd, she said she wanted her funeral to fea-
ture Judy Garland’s “I Happen to Like New
York.” In the two decades previous toSex
and the City, she appeared in twenty-five
plays on and off Broadway.
While Nixon had never done sex scenes
before, she didn’t mind nudity. Her previ-
ous roles hadn’t required it, but, as she later
explained, she breastfed her newborn34 EW.COM MAY 11, 2018
( From left )Kristin Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kim Cattrall; creator Darren Star and ParkerTwenty years ago,DARREN
STAR INTRODUCED THE WORLD TO
FOUR UNFORGETTABLE, UNAPOLOGETICALLY
SINGLE WOMEN. TELEVISION—AND
STANDARDS FOR ACCEPTABLE BRUNCH
TALK—WOULD NEVER BE THE SAME. IN HER
NEW BOOK,SEX AND THE CITY AND US,
FORMER EW WRITERJENNIFER KEISHIN
ARMSTRONG (SEINFELDIA) UNCOVERS
THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE HBO SHOW.
THIS EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT DETAILS HOW
SARAH JESSICA PARKER, CYNTHIA NIXON,
KRISTIN DAVIS, AND KIM CATTRALL
LANDED THEIR ICONIC ROLES.
EVERETT COLLECTION (2)