Cynthia Nixon: 'Sex And The City Was Always A Feminist Show'

Graziadaily

26-05-2025

Cynthia Nixon (who, it must be said, is such a Miranda) does not sugar coat it when I ask her how the mood is among liberals in New York right now, living under Trump 2.0. 'It's terrible. It's very hard to even say: how are you?' She shakes her head, lists a few things she is newly concerned about this week ('Like, why would we need a Department of Education? Ha!'), then tells me about a few of the things she is trying to do about it.
Just before we meet, she and her wife, education activist Christine Marinoni, threw a benefit for the Democrat Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani at their house. It was co-hosted by Sarita Choudhury, her costar in And Just Like That , and Nixon's The Gilded Age co-stars Morgan Spector and Denée Benton. She's also due to walk in a 'fashion show for the trans community' and attend a Hands Off protest in Bryant Park, while also organising her 59th birthday party, a fundraiser for the Chicago Abortion Fund.
Nixon, 59, is one of the most politically active actors out there: she ran for governor of New York City in 2018 (she lost but has said that the process enabled her to 'shed light on progressive issues'). Right now, 'I've been throwing myself into a number of political things. You're in despair all the time anyway, but either you're in despair and paralysed, or there are things you're working on.'
At the same time, Nixon is currently promoting not one, but two major HBO shows. Aforementioned The Gilded Age is about New York City in its 1800s boom time. She plays Ada Forte, long-suffering sister of caustic aristocrat Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski). And, of course, there's season three of And Just Like That . For the first time, the shows were filmed simultaneously, so Nixon's 2024 sounds pretty fraught, spent whizzing between centuries, characters and locations, from Brooklyn to Albany.
We sit in an empty studio after Nixon's cover shoot. She has changed into her own clothes and carries a backpack that might well belong to one of her three kids, decorated with superhero-themed cartoon strips. Though Sex And The City will always be known for introducing the world to the Baguettes, Birkins and brownstones of the upper crust Manhattan lifestyle, it was never the glamour that appealed to Nixon. ('I never pay any attention to the clothes,' she says, and visibly glazes over when I ask about Miranda's wardrobe.) But she is passionate about the ways the show changed the media landscape for women. It is, she says, 'a feminist show – it's always been a feminist show'.
'What you have to remember is that we were in our thirties and forties. Of course, I look at the show now, we look like babies, but being single at that age, at that time, still had a kind of stigma.' Its central message was unheard of: 'You can be a woman, you can have a lot of sex with a lot of different people. It didn't make you a slut and it didn't mean you were using sex to get something. You were having sex – because you enjoyed having sex!' she says. When it first aired in 1998, long before shows like Girls , Insecure and Dying For Sex , that message felt revolutionary.
In the late '90s and '00s, the show ruled pop culture so comprehensively that the question of whether one was a Carrie, a Charlotte, a Samantha or a Miranda became the Myers-Briggs of the age. Miranda, who cared less about designer labels and was 'defined by her career and friendships' was not necessarily the aspirational choice. 'People used to see her as very didactic and strident and humourless,' says Nixon.
In recent years, however, she has developed a cult following, and many fans are firmly Team Miranda. Nixon has noticed the shift. 'Stuff she was ballyhooing from the rooftops, I think, became common wisdom. The culture did sort of move to meet where Miranda was standing,' she says – though she catches herself. 'I mean, that has been true in recent history. Of course, in America, and I think in many places, the world is moving again. Away from a lot of the feminist ideas that Miranda had.'
Such a calibrated answer is typical of Nixon, who never tips into full-on nostalgia when speaking about the show, tempting as it is to do so. She watched the entire series in preparation for And Just Like That and felt that 90% was 'still pretty great', but 'certain things have really not aged well'. Even at the time, 'it was always very difficult being on a show that was so white. I always hated that. When we would raise it, we were told: this is Candace Bushnell's world and it's a very white world. I'm like, OK…' she says. Also, she says, 'some of the trans stuff, some of the gay stuff was a little cringy to look at'.
Nixon is, of course, a high-profile member of New York's LGBTQ+ community herself. As has been relentlessly unpicked, And Just Like That attempted to address some of the omissions from the original series with more inclusive casting and storylines about race and LGBTQ+ relationships.
The Sex And The City universe has always inspired big feelings in viewers (somewhere on Reddit there are still people complaining that Carrie cheated on Aidan), but the outpouring over some storylines, particularly Miranda leaving husband Steve for the polarising Che Diaz, was unprecedented. Nixon says the 'poor Steve' narrative 'doesn't really bother me. Our show always killed its darlings. If we're just gonna play it safe and nice, why are you watching?'
Nixon, who suggested Sara Ramirez for the part of Che, says, 'I love Che, I love Sara. It's hard to know what people would have made of Che if Che hadn't ostensibly broken up Steve and Miranda. But I don't want a show in which everybody is behaving well all the time. A feminist show doesn't show women being perfect.'
For all the drama in the comments, on set, she says, the show feels like home. She is close to Kristin Davis, who recently described Nixon as 'my protector', about which Nixon explains that, back in the day, Davis, despite being 'a very powerful person', could sometimes be a little 'too polite. I am the bull in the china shop.' She and Sarah Jessica Parker are firm friends and have a lot in common. They knew each other as child actors – 'we were always auditioning for the same thing. We both had moms who were really all about education and were all about not spending too much money. I mean, in Sarah's case, it was really dire. There is a kind of a theatre ratness about us, we're little kids who grew up in the theatre, we're very New York.'
She can't say too much about this season of AJLT , though it has been announced that Ramirez won't return. 'Both the old show and the new show are more fun when people are dating, so Miranda will be dating.' She says that wild upheavals are the point. When she was younger, 'I always imagined that all of the big twists and turns of my life would happen by my early twenties. I thought life was a bit flat after that.' That has not been the case, for Nixon or Miranda, who came to the last season questioning her sexuality, her marriage ('dead in the water') and her career.
'When you're getting out of your childrearing years it is like a form of adolescence. You can return to yourself. There's a lot more behind you than ahead of you. And so it's like: how am I feeling about where I've got to so far? And if I don't like it, am I going to do something about it?'
She says such questions are why the roles she is offered now are so much juicer than they were when she was younger. 'I feel like there is a desire to have women who are of childbearing age, sort of bland and sane, because we don't want women who are looking after children to be scary and complicated.'
An alarm on her phone sounds. Then there's a phone call. A taxi awaits, to take her to view a prospective school for her youngest child. And with that she is off, backpack on shoulder. The next evening, I see her on Instagram, walking the catwalk wearing a neon green dress at an event for Trans Day of Visibility, with Madonna and Julia Fox in the audience; a week later she's posting from the Hand's Off NYC protest. Not one to sit still, as she told me. 'We're just doing what we can do. If one tries to think of a bright side or a silver lining or whatever, you know, these terrible times are when big things can happen.'
Season three of 'And Just Like That' is on Sky Comedy and NOW from 30 May
Photographer: Emily Soto
Styling: Alicia Lombardini