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If you?re a fan of Sarah Jessica Parker, her profile in the New Yorker is a must-read. If you?re like me and you find her exhausting, please praise me for getting through this damn thing. It?s so long!!! Jesus H., she?s not that interesting and there are only so many stories we can read about SJP being polite to tourists. SJP is obviously promoting the new season of And Just Like That, the ?spinoff? of Sex and the City. The New Yorker devoted 10,000 words to this and they never really answered the question of ?why revisit these characters in this way?? I mean, there is one answer: playing Carrie Bradshaw is SJP?s most successful project, and she wants to keep riding that, but she dresses it up as fan-service. Some highlights from this New Yorker piece.
The Bitter Ender: Parker calls herself a ?bitter ender.? Performance, in her approach, requires the discipline to stick with it. Even trying on designer clothes can be an act of endurance. She told me she?d welcome the chance to one day lean into her fascination with regimentation and play, against type, the role of a nun.
She avoids the discourse over AJLT: ?No one sends me press clippings. I don?t get reviews, watch reviews, read reviews.? She continues to play Carrie because, as she put it, she finds the material ?unmistakably rich,? but also out of what seems to be a peculiar sense of responsibility. When the reboot was about to dbut, in the midst of the pandemic, she described it as a kind of palliative: ?The world of Carrie and her friends has always been about coming home, and I felt like we needed that right now,? she told Vogue.
Her relationship with Robert Downey Jr in her 20s: ?People around him would be dismissive of me, but I had given him stability and tried to create a steady heartbeat that allowed him to show up on time. That made me angry and embarrassed me.?
Dating John Kennedy Jr: In the summer of 1991, Parker met John F. Kennedy, Jr., at the theatre. He asked her out, and they dated for a few months. Paparazzi trailed them everywhere. In a Times profile of Parker not long afterward, she sounded shell-shocked. ?I never had any idea what real fame was,? she said, adding, ?When I die, they are going to say, ?Oh, yeah, Sarah once dated John Kennedy.? ?
The dirty girl talk on SATC: ?That just was not how I conducted conversations,? she said. (She did, for a time, smoke cigarettes.) She?d never done nudity professionally, and she told Star that she didn?t intend to. Even now, she sounds somewhat confounded by Carrie?s life style. ?I could never do any of that stuff in my life. It would be immoral. It would be unprincipled. An affair, husbands, kissing, buying, drinking?whims, whims, whims!?
The Kim Cattrall catfight: When ?And Just Like That? premired, some fans were outraged that Samantha had been written out. Cattrall claimed in an interview that she?d learned about the new show on social media, ?like everyone else.? Parker told me, ?We felt like it had been made clear by her that this was not a character she wanted to revisit.? In Season 1, Samantha is estranged from the other friends. Her text messages from London are infrequent and terse. But in May Variety leaked the news that Cattrall would be returning in the Season 2 finale, for a phone-conversation scene that she?d filmed ?without seeing or speaking with? her co-stars. The tabloids scoured the story for evidence of acrimony. As in the past, Parker has practiced a tight-lipped diplomacy. ?It?s the weirdest thing, to be told we?re in a catfight,? she said to me. ?I would never speak poorly about Kim. I just wouldn?t.? Parker said that King had ?begged? her not to discuss the Cattrall cameo, but she did admit, ?I am in the scene.?
[From The New Yorker]
?I am in the scene? meaning that Cattrall filmed her cameo separately, completely away from SJP and everyone else, and they will have Samantha talking on the phone to Carrie. There?s no way in hell Cattrall would have agreed to do a scene in the same room with Sarah Jessica at this point. As for ?I would never speak poorly about Kim. I just wouldn?t.? Please. She literally HAS sh-ttalked Cattrall constantly for years, she just hides behind sources or other people (like Andy Cohen) to do her dirty work. I was also surprised that she spoke sharply about her relationship with Robert Downey Jr usually she avoids discussing him entirely, but that was her biggest relationship before Matthew Broderick.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Backgrid.
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