Cynthia Nixon opened up about what it was like to film And Just Like That without Kim Cattrall after six seasons of Sex and the City and two movies with her as part of the core four.
In a surprising turn of events, news broke in May that Cattrall would be reprising her role as Samantha Jones for a top-secret cameo in the finale of AJLT season two. Nixon told Vanity Fair that she read about Cattrall’s return in the script but hasn’t seen the episode yet. She also got candid about how things were different in season one without Samantha.
“It felt very different also because we have these new amazing characters, and we’re older and our fictional children are now largely grown,” the Miranda Hobbes actress told the publication. “Many things felt different. But the main thing that felt so great was that everybody who was there really wanted to be there. That’s just the bottom line.”
She continued, “We all love each other, we love our show, we wanted to do more of it. And we all wanted to be there. So that makes an enormous difference, that you’re not walking around on eggshells with someone who’s unhappy for reasons that are hard to even understand what they are.”
Nixon’s comments come on the heels of the news that Cattrall would be briefly returning to the SATC universe after a possible third movie fell through in 2017. At the time, reports suggested that Cattrall had made demands that Warner Bros. wasn’t comfortable with, so she bowed out, and Nixon, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis didn’t want to do the movie without her, so it didn’t happen.
When plans for AJLT came across the actress’ desks, they decided that they could move forward without Samantha because they knew what showrunner Michael Patrick King wanted to do, and they loved it, Parker explained to The Hollywood Reporter in June 2022. She also revealed that they didn’t approach Cattrall about returning for the sequel series.
“She made it clear that that wasn’t something she wanted to pursue, and it no longer felt comfortable for us, and so it didn’t occur to us,” Parker said on THR‘s Awards Chatter podcast. “That’s not ‘slamming’ her, it’s just learning. You’ve got to listen to somebody, and if they’re publicly talking about something, and it doesn’t suggest it’s someplace they want to be, or a person they want to play, or an environment in which they want to be, you get to an age where you’re like, ‘Well, we hear that.’”
Source: Hollywood
