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Sarah Jessica Parker is making the bed: With her back to me, she pulls the under sheet taut in swift, practiced gestures, fluffs up the pillows, and spreads the comforter just so, before stepping back to observe her handiwork. Suddenly sensing that I’ve entered the room, she whirls around and smiles. “Oh, hi!” she says. “I’m sorry, I just had to straighten up here.” Despite her glamorous looks—her blonde hair pulled back in a sleek bun and her full-skirted vintage dress worn over a leopard-print button-down, all accessorized with a pair of high, glittering block-heel pumps, a model from her SJP shoe line—she seems more than anything a diligent, efficient mom making sure things are under control at home. (“That bed thing is so her,” the Bravo host Andy Cohen tells me later of his good friend’s conscientiousness. “That bed needs to get made, and so she’s going to do it.”)
Parker, however, is not at the West Village town house that she shares with her husband, the actor Matthew Broderick, and their 12-year-old twin daughters, Tabitha and Loretta (the couple’s son, James Wilkie, recently left home for college), nor is the bed her own. It belongs to Carrie Bradshaw, the character Parker has been most closely associated with throughout her career. It is hard to overestimate the iconicity of Sex and the City, which ran on HBO for six seasons, between 1998 and 2004, and later yielded two movie sequels. For a generation of women, the show almost single-handedly defined, in ways both poignant and comedic, distressing and dazzling, what it means to navigate the challenges and triumphs of friendship, love, and career, through the interlocking stories of four best friends in turn-of-the-millennium NYC. “It was a show about glamorous women who often find themselves in unglamorous situations, and about how that’s not the end of the world,” the actor and writer Tavi Gevinson tells me. “Watching it in high school gave me my first glimpse into adulthood, into womanhood, into what it’s like to live in New York.”
And now, we have a new chapter—And Just Like That…, a 10-episode sequel series that has brought Parker, once again, to Carrie’s beloved one-bedroom, rebuilt on a set at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios. The show, which is due this month on HBO Max, and on which Parker is an executive producer, has been greeted by SATC fans with an anticipation approaching frenzy. Returning will be Parker, as the freewheeling, ambivalently independent freelance writer turned podcaster Carrie; Cynthia Nixon as the no-nonsense attorney Miranda; and Kristin Davis as the winningly prim stay-at-home mom Charlotte. (Kim Cattrall, who played the lusty PR maven Samantha, is the only member of the original foursome who will not be reprising her role, having fired some shots at her former costars online in recent years, in what the tabloids have characterized as a “feud.” “We have some new people, and we have some people who aren’t back anymore,” Parker says diplomatically.) Since shooting began in July, details about the new series have been kept under tight wraps, with a vigilance more usually accorded to Top Secret state files. This, of course, has only stoked public excitement: TikToks and Instagrams of the actors shooting on location have been analyzed with a kremlinologist’s dedication. Does a scene for which some of the extras are dressed in black suggest that a main character would be killed off, and if so, who? (Samantha? Carrie’s husband, Mr. Big? Her former paramour, Aidan?) “I’m going to leave you very unsatisfied,” Parker says, friendly but firm, when I attempt to prod her for details. When I call Michael Patrick King, a producer and writer of SATC who has now returned to showrun the new series, he is similarly mum. “I’m not going to tell you because I also wouldn’t tell you what I got you for Christmas,” he says. “You can see the package, and it’s gorgeous. Why would I ruin the surprise?”
Fair! And yet, I am lucky enough to be allowed into the inner sanctum—the set of Carrie’s apartment, surely the dream of any SATC enthusiast. “Wait, you get to actually be inside her place from the show? That’s crazy!” my daughter’s babysitter, Lyla, exclaims when she hears the news. At 21, she is part of SATC’s younger demographic, barely born when the series first aired, who have grown familiar with it via streaming. “Every time we shoot on location, maybe 50 women wait at the end of the day to say hi to the ladies, and they’re all between the ages of 25 and 30,” King tells me. “Fourteen-year-old girls walking the dog with their dads call out to me, ‘I can’t wait!’ ” Parker says. “I think young women still really relate to this story. It’s about finding friendships that matter, looking for work that fulfills you, and pursuing love, even when it drags you, bloodied, down the street.”
Lyla, in any case, has the right idea: There is something irresistible and a little dislocating about being in a real-life space that I have watched so many times onscreen. Barring the studios’ open-roof plan, and the sounds of frequent drilling and sawing from nearby sets in progress—“There’s a lot of magic here, but also a lot of really hard work,” Parker says—I feel for a moment as if I’m on the Upper East Side, or at least its TV version, and that Parker might settle down at any moment, perhaps wearing something fabulous if a little odd (men’s briefs? A hunting cap? A velour tube top?), light up a cig, and tap out one of her famous “I couldn’t help but wonder”s on her laptop.
At this point Parker’s story is a familiar one. One of eight siblings from Cincinnati, she began performing as a child, moving to New York and working onstage and onscreen as a jobbing actor for years, before achieving real stardom as Carrie, in her mid-30s. It is also a truism to note how different she herself is from her SATC alter ego. Parker has none of Carrie’s caution-to-the-wind willfulness and changeability: She’s unfailingly, sincerely gracious. (“Sarah is one of those people who never forgets anyone,” Cohen says.) She’s curious and thoughtful. (“Soon after we met, she asked me what Nepalese food tastes like,” her friend, the designer Prabal Gurung, who was raised in Kathmandu, tells me. “And two days later, I get a phone call, and she says, ‘Let’s go,’ and picks me up to go to a Nepalese restaurant in Queens. In 12 years in the fashion industry, no one else has done that for me. She’s the sort of person who really sees you.”) She never curses, preferring to use “stinking” or “freaking” instead of their stronger counterparts, and sprinkles her speech with old-timey expressions (“Thanks a million!”).
She’s also famously hardworking, the first one to the AJLT set, the last one out. “Sarah has a million obligations, personal and professional, and she gets an A+ on all of them,” says Cynthia Nixon. “Carrie doesn’t have a lot of responsibilities, and she doesn’t always make the best decisions. When we’re shooting a restaurant scene, Sarah won’t order a salad or a steak; she’ll be like, ‘too sensible for Carrie.’ She’ll order escargots instead.” It’s been four months of 15-hour shoot days for Parker, and next week she’ll be heading straight to the Rhode Island set of Disney’s Hocus Pocus 2, before careening back to New York in the new year to open Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite on Broadway alongside Broderick, a production that was shut down by COVID on the eve of its original premiere in March 2020. There’s also the wine label she runs and her SJP line of handmade-in-Italy footwear. (The celebrity-spotting Instagram account @deuxmoi has more than once included accounts of Parker herself on her hands and knees, buckling a customer’s shoe at one of the company’s New York stores.) “How can I even complain when I know what’s going on in this country, and how it’s failed working parents?” Parker responds when I asked her how she, quote unquote, gets it all done. “I don’t have any tips and tricks, except that I’m incredibly fortunate that I have childcare and a partner, because so many mothers who work two and three jobs do not.”
That said, being remarkably organized can’t hurt. Back to the apartment tour. “I had all of the original stuff in my own storage. Furniture, clothes, everything, packed according to season and episode and scene,” Parker says. She points out the black rotary phone on a peeling white chair by the bed, the round midcentury coffee table, the stacks of old Vogue magazines crowding the bookshelves, all as familiar to me as objects from a dream. But it is when she leads me into Carrie’s walk-in closet that I sense my life nearly flashing before my eyes. “I kept every single solitary thing,” Parker tells me. She begins to rifle through the items, now hanging neatly in the wardrobe. She pulls out the pair of tiny bedazzled Dolce & Gabbana briefs, featured in the season four episode in which Carrie wipes out on the runway; the white denim cutoffs she wore when smoking a bong with her much younger comics-store-clerk boyfriend in season three; the tawny fur coat she bundled up in when sitting on a stoop with the golden-showers-loving politician she briefly dated, also in season three. And then, of course, there are the vertiginous Manolos: “Here are the Hangisis Big gave Carrie when he proposed; the sandals Aidan’s dog chewed on; the black pumps she wore to the Vogue fashion closet.…” But wait, I ask, doesn’t Carrie live with Big? What does she need this apartment with all this stuff in it for? Parker pauses, turning away for a moment from her spectacular cache. “One of the questions that’s going to come up in And Just Like That… will be, What is it about a place like this that you need to hold on to for all these years?” she finally says. “Why can’t you just let it go?”
This question can be taken literally, as in, how many archival Anna Sui slips, Prada clutches, and DVF wrap dresses does one need to keep, in a separate one-bedroom, no less, on this journey we call life? But there is also a larger, more symbolic matter here, of course. Have the changes in our modern circumstances—political, social, environmental—made the question of revisiting Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte moot? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to just let them go? “In the spring of 2020, I was talking with Michael Patrick about doing a podcast about the behind-the-scenes making of Sex and the City,” Parker, who has settled into one of Carrie’s old chairs in her living room, tells me. “And we spoke about what we were missing in the pandemic: joy, community, the experience of being together. The world of Carrie and her friends has always been about coming home, and I felt like we needed that right now.” I tell Parker how, when I moved to the States from Israel two decades ago to go to graduate school, where I didn’t know a single person, one of the first things I bought was a full DVD set of SATC, because it reminded me of watching it with my girlfriends back in Tel Aviv. “Sex and the City has always been about the friendships that sustain you,” Parker says, nodding. “That, and the promise and potential this city holds.” When I speak to Kristin Davis, she is even bolder. “People are like, ‘Why should they come back?’ and it really bugs me. Are women’s lives not interesting now? Nobody ever asks, ‘Why would you do this violent remake over and over again?’ For me that is so indicative of our reluctance to sit and watch women’s lives develop over time.”
Parker is aware, however, that in 2021, a show in which a group of wealthy straight white women parade around the Upper East Side toting fistfuls of luxury-emporium shopping bags would not be reflective of where New York is right now—post-COVID, post-BLM. (“The incredible lack of diversity was the Achilles’ heel of the show, the first time around,” Nixon tells me.) It was important to both Parker and King to diversify the cast as well as the writers room. The Black actors Nicole Ari Parker and Karen Pittman have been brought on, as have Sara Ramírez, who is Mexican American and nonbinary, and Sarita Choudhury, who is of English and Bengali-Indian descent. “In no way were we interested in tokenism,” Sarah Jessica says. “You can’t bring people on the show and not let the camera be with them! These characters are all gifts to us.” When I talk to Ramírez, they confirm Parker’s view. “Sarah Jessica came into this project with such intentionality and care. I play a complicated queer character who’s smart and funny and sexy and dynamic,” they say. “I was a huge fan of Sex and the City back in the day,” says Samantha Irby, a new staff writer on the show, who is Black. “But there were some moments where I was like, If there had been a Black writer in the room, this would have probably played differently. Of course, things change in the span of 20 years. Approaching the Black and brown people on the show this time around, it was important to me to make them feel real and not just plopped in. That said, this isn’t meant to be preachy. I’d never want to write a scold-y show, where watching it is like taking your medicine.” (Parker, too, attempts to reassure on this point, promising the series won’t skimp on frivolity: “We’re keenly aware of the affection people have for certain things connected with the show. It’s like perfume: You have the beautiful packaging and the bottle, and then you have the juice.”) When I catch Nicole Ari Parker on the phone, she says, “The writers are skillful about having the characters, whether they’re of color or not, acknowledge the newness they’re experiencing. But it all fits in with the same beloved tone of the show. The clothes alone are to die for.” She laughs. “And let me tell you, there’s still a lot of sex in this version of Sex and the City.”
The fact that most of the women having sex on the show are now in their 50s, is, in and of itself, a pretty radical proposition in the current TV landscape. “When we announced And Just Like That…, there were a lot of positive reactions, but one bitchy response online was people sharing pictures of the Golden Girls. And I was like, ‘Wow, so it’s either you’re 35, or you’re retired and living in Florida. There’s a missing chapter here,’ ” King tells me. “I like that we’re not trying to youthify the show. We’re not including, like, a 21-year-old niece,” Nixon says. “I think it’s revolutionary to do a show about middle-aged women, with their aging lady bodies,” Irby says. Parker seems to agree. “There’s so much misogynist chatter in response to us that would never. Happen. About. A. Man,” she says, punctuating every word with a clap. “ ‘Gray hair gray hair gray hair. Does she have gray hair?’ I’m sitting with Andy Cohen,” Parker goes on, “and he has a full head of gray hair, and he’s exquisite. Why is it okay for him? I don’t know what to tell you people! Especially on social media. Everyone has something to say. ‘She has too many wrinkles, she doesn’t have enough wrinkles.’ It almost feels as if people don’t want us to be perfectly okay with where we are, as if they almost enjoy us being pained by who we are today, whether we choose to age naturally and not look perfect, or whether you do something if that makes you feel better. I know what I look like. I have no choice. What am I going to do about it? Stop aging? Disappear?”
But Parker is nowhere near ready to disappear. A few days after our meeting at Steiner Studios, I see her again, this time on the set of her Vogue shoot, on an achingly perfect New York fall day. Beyond the patio of the photo studio, on the far West Side of Manhattan, the Hudson stretches clear and blue, One World Trade a glinting obelisk to the south. Though I know Parker is not Carrie, it’s a fascinating thing to see how, in front of the camera, she is able to skillfully slip on that character’s playful mantle. Her hair down her back in those signature loose blonde ringlets, she poses in a structured sleeveless cream Balenciaga Couture dress, embroidered richly in a lattice of pink flowers, as upbeat go-girl anthems play in the background (Britney’s “Toxic,” Blondie’s “One Way or Another,” Madonna’s “Material Girl”). After a few moments, she decides that the dress needs an extra something, and she retires, along with the stylist Tabitha Simmons, to the wardrobe, to try on a number of whimsical hats, before settling on an enormous floppy number from Libertine, on which Simmons pins a few precious jeweled brooches from Kentshire and Fred Leighton. There! The combination is kooky, but it works. It is, too, very Carrie. “This is heaven!” Simmons shouts, as Parker perches on a stool, as comfortable as if she were in sweats, her smile radiant. I am reminded of something the young designer Christopher John Rogers told me over the phone, when he recalled Parker wearing a design of his to the Forces of Fashion conference in 2020. “It was this hot pink dress, and she decided to wear it backwards, with the neck ties sort of streaming down her back. It was slightly off, but she made it her own.”
An hour later, Parker and crew caravan a few blocks east, to the corner of 23rd and Eighth, to take a few pictures on the street. Wearing another floppy Libertine hat, paired with a sparkly coat from the brand, a sheer, beaded Prada dress, and a mismatched pair of holographic SJP pumps, Parker walks from her car to a nearby crosswalk, whose length she strides again and again for the camera. Very quickly, a crowd of pedestrians—mostly women, mostly in their 20s and 30s—begins to gather, and iPhones are whipped out to document the scene. “OMG stop, Zoe isn’t going to believe this,” one woman whispers to herself as she records a video. “Sarah Jessica, you’re so beautiful, girl!!” a young man screams. “I’m dying!” a Gen Z’er says to her friend. There is something particularly moving, particularly nature-is-healing, New York–is–back–baby, about seeing Parker in her element, strutting down an NYC street like Elvis in Memphis, her hair flowing, swinging a lime-green sequined Fendi bag, as if no time has passed since the memorable SATC episode of 20 years ago, in which Carrie gets mugged for both her Manolos and her purple Baguette.
But, of course, time does pass. A week later, I speak to Parker on the phone. News had just broken of the death of Willie Garson, who had played the fan-favorite role of Carrie’s BFF Stanford Blatch on both SATC and AJLT, and who had been battling cancer; and mere days before, George Malkemus, Parker’s partner in the SJP shoe line, passed away as well, also of cancer. In our conversation, she sounds stricken by the deaths of her two friends, both of whom she’d been close to, personally and professionally, for decades. “All I can say right now is that it’s as if a scoop has been taken out of me this week, and I don’t expect it to be filled. In time, my body will grow accustomed to this new architecture, but now I feel truly blue,” she says, with some difficulty. For a moment, she sounds on the verge of tears, but then she takes a long breath. “It’s such a loss, and I think about how I’ll miss the joy of these relationships. I think about Willie and the show and how much we laughed. And I guess despite everything, that’s the headline: There’s so much good in the world, and we were all so lucky to be together, doing something we loved.”
In this story: hair, Chris McMillan; makeup, Elaine Offers. Set design, Julia Wagner.