Although she’ll always be a Carrie, Sarah Jessica Parker almost turned down her iconic starring role in Sex and the City.
The 6x Golden Globe winner recently explained why she originally asked her agent to “get me out” of the HBO series after it was picked up following the filming of the pilot episode in June 1997.
Although she had a “lovely” time filming the first episode, Parker told her co-star Kristin Davis on her Are You a Charlotte? podcast, “When the show was picked up, I panicked. I was like, I can’t be on a TV show. I don’t think I’m suited for that life.”
“It’s very hard to explain. It also kind of depressed me,” added Parker. “I think that it was the idea of doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I think I’d always been lucky that I got to be in a television series, and then it was over. I met great people, had a great experience, worked with great actors, great directors, thought the stories were interesting, wanted to do the shows, and they had shorter lives, maybe one or two seasons. And then I moved on.”
Although she had previously appeared on other TV shows, Parker preferred smaller guest roles as a “journeyman” actor who liked to be available for film and stage roles as well. “You want to be moving,” she said. “That to me was having it all.”
Kristin Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kim Cattrall in ‘Sex and the City’
Max
Parker continued, “The idea of a television series meant that I couldn’t do all those things. And it just kind of felt like somebody was, you know, putting their hand over my mouth or something. It was very weird.”
“I talked to my agents and I said, ‘Hey, can you get me out of this?’” recalled Parker, noting she offered to do multiple movies for the network instead, but her agent told her, “Do it for a year, and if you don’t want to do it anymore, we won’t do it.”
After meeting the show’s famed costume designer Patricia Field, it “went from being this oppressive idea to endless possibilities” for Parker. “And I never looked back. And I was never not happy to be there. There was no place I would rather have been than on our set every single solitary day,” she said.
Based on Candace Bushnell’s New York Observer column, Sex and the City ran for six seasons on HBO from 1998 to 2004, followed by two theatrically-released feature films in 2008 and 2010, as well as the CW prequel series The Carrie Diaries (2013-’14). The sequel series And Just Like That… debuted on HBO Max in 2021, kicking off its third season on May 29.
