Sarah Jessica Parker worried Carrie Bradshaw was too similar to Ferris Bueller
With And Just Like That currently making a spectacle of itself, more people than ever, it seems, are rewatching Sex and the City. Among those people, of course, is Kristin Davis, whose rewatch podcast Are You a Charlotte? is a bit of a sensation.
Those that return to the initial episodes are often surprised by the stylistic quirks of the show's early days — specifically the "talking head" interviews with people on the street, and when Sarah Jessica Parker's character Carrie Bradshaw would regularly "break the fourth wall" and directly address the camera.
The topic came up again when John Benjamin Hickey stopped by Davis' studio this week to chat about his time on the show as Thomas John Andersen, a playwright who is dating Cynthia Nixon's Miranda, but has a lot of Catholic guilt about premarital sex.
Davis reiterated that both the series' primary director Michael Patrick King and Parker disliked the gimmick.
"Sarah Jessica's very open mission was to get rid of talking to the camera," Davis recollected. "Because I remember in the pilot her saying, 'You know, do I have to talk to the camera? It's so strange to break the fourth wall. I'm in this scene.'"
Davis explained that she "wasn't wrong" and it was a "weird thing for an actor," before sharing that Parker told her she was "worried about Ferris Bueller, which I had never thought of."
Of course, the iconic rascal teenager Ferris Bueller wasn't the first character ever to talk directly to the camera, but the man who played him, Matthew Broderick, was Parker's (then quite new) husband. (This is now your cue to say "aha!")
And Hickey pretty much did that exact thing. (He actually said "wow," then added that "nobody ever did it better," referring to Broderick in the classic John Hughes comedy.)
Davis said that Parker "thought she was never going to live up to that, which is so adorable."
Continuing to praise Parker (a common theme on this podcast!), Davis said, "I had never seen an actress be able to speak so clearly about what they wanted to do and what they didn't want to do without being angry or histrionic or whatever. Just very clearly articulating why it was hard for her, why she felt like she wasn't doing it well, how she felt like it was better to stay with us in the scene. And I was like, 'Yes. Yes. I agree with her.'" Then she zinged, "Not that anyone cares what I think over here!"
Incidentally, the Tony-winning Hickey, who played opposite Nixon again on The Big C, recently directed a Broadway revival of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite, which starred Parker and Broderick. (Way to save on car fare!)
To listen to all of Hickey's appearance on Are You a Charlotte? you can check out the link below.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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So, when we build around that and you align it with a smart channel mix -- earned press, story, social first storytelling, influencer amplification, which is really big now, and sometimes even collaborating with brands or doing some sort of immersive experience activation -- those all ladder out to the same mission, which is driving impact and doing it with intention. Baltin: The most important thing for artists is authenticity. When you're working with brands how do you keep the authenticity? Singerff: Influencer marketing in 2025 is a must. And I know that comes with possibly some angry connotations, but it's becoming a precision tool. So, if you can match the right creator with the right message and back it up with smart whitelisting, you're not just hoping for the ROI (Return on Investment), you're actually completely engineering it. That's where performance PR comes in. That's somewhat of a new term and it's something that is a newer element that all campaigns and all agencies and all brands should be incorporating into every single campaign that they're heading. And that's really where we live at Jive. I want to talk about a brand that we did this with, which was Daiya Foods, the vegan cheese brand. We did an influencer campaign, and we did it with precision in ROI. And we ended up targeting micro macro influencers to authentically share the Daiya plant-based story. We did it by unlocking this organic buzz and we addressed real consumer concerns. One of their real consumer concerns was that their vegan cheese didn't taste that great. So, we completely tapped into it. We asked influencers just to talk about their experience and say like, 'Yeah, it didn't taste that great. This is why they've redone their recipe and redid their formula for it to taste better.' That's authentic. That's also just exposing the reality of concerns and shifting perceptions. And then we ignited this whole social conversation that went viral, and we delivered millions of engagements and impressions with a really low CPC (Cost Per Click). It was very successful and going back into your question on authenticity, there is, I feel a really great formula that works once you find it. It's really just understanding the brand and matching it with the right creators. Baltin: What are some of the brands that you've worked with? How do you balance it all and make sure that every campaign is different and not just following a formula because vegan cheese is not going to be the same as the dinosaur museum or an escape game. Singerff: Yeah, I've done PR for a lot. You're absolutely correct. There's an element of leaning into nostalgia. That's incredible and it's having its own moment right now. We're seeing Nike, Airbnb, Duolingo, Patagonia, they're all tapping into the same patterns. Nostalgia in a campaign. Not just throwbacks just for the sake of the throwback, but the throwback taps into an emotional equity. Using the past to say something really bold about the future. If that's a really retro, cool campaigns that hits Gen Z, or the reboot of a legacy brand, or Nike bringing back all those football players for a commercial they're doing right now, Ronaldinho and a few other ones are in there, it resonates and it hits deep. That creates the layers of storytelling and that is what makes a brand campaign successful. That's the blend of the cultural fluency, creator strategy, earned instincts. It's all about data analysts, storytelling, even kind of just being like a trend hunter or trend jacking, you have to move fast. A new cycle doesn't wait for anybody. Neither does the algorithm. So, the campaign has to have a little bit of depth, speed, a little bit of soul, a little bit of story, and it's going to land. 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It's just understanding how to turn on that cultural listening. What we do really well at Jive is that we're constantly plugged in. We are looking at any trending moments and that's from TikTok to CNN, to very different channels saying very different things in very different ways, but they are tapping into their own audiences that are going to resonate with some of our brands. Again, the beauty of an agency, you're working with a huge wide range of people. Understanding the media shifts is a really big thing that we talk about. There are new platforms coming up every day. There's huge turnover in newsrooms. There's a lot of AI assisted platforms and tools which you lean into, and audience sentiment is also huge. Social listening, creator communities, creator economy, the comment sections. There are a lot of cultural conversations happening. Campaigns often have to lead to emotion and some sort of narrative, but they have to just build earned media moments into everything they do. And I think that exists, whether it be an artist or a brand or a museum opening. They all share the same approach to building a smart campaign. Baltin: What successful campaigns have you enjoyed? What kind of brands or companies do you like working with? Singerff: I really enjoyed working with the museum. There's actually quite a few that I've enjoyed. I've worked now with so many diverse sets of sectors and spaces and that comes with its own set of thought leaders and its own substance and just different ways of building in longevity with different clients. But the museum, which is the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum, what was really unique about that experience is that we started working with them a full year ahead of its grand opening. That's a pretty long runway, which is a huge luxury to have, and it's a massive strategic advantage. So, it allowed us to fully immerse ourselves in the brand, understand its voice, understand its cultural significance, but also they have a scientific significance. We could build a deeply layered narrative that we could flex across a lot of different media verticals. The process of that was so enjoyable. I personally loved working with them. We executed something that not all campaigns get, but we've had three really deliberate phases, which was the tease, launch, and sustained phase. They each have their own goals or messaging, their own press opportunities, but it allowed us to do a lot of real-time media hooks. And we got to tap into a lot of different types of media platforms and caliber of media throughout each phase. So, for example, the launch phase saw all of the top tier national editors because they got to come in and do exclusive walks of the museum -- New York Times, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, NBC, the front page of USA Today. And now that we're in the sustained phase we've started working with a lot of consumer lifestyle and entertainment media. That's because we're focusing on converting ticket sales so that takes us into Buzzfeed and The Today Show we secured a segment with Late Night with Seth Meyers. We got a mention on the Joe Rogan podcast. So, the narrative shifts. It's a different group of outlets. When you're working with a product, like a museum, the story is then driven through the actual product itself. So, you're getting the product in people's hands. It's a tangible approach. You're sending it to key journalists. You're sending it to key influencers. Or you can send the journalist to the museum. The goal is the same, you want them to experience it. You want them to have some sort of one-on-one touch point with it so that they can create their own opinion about it, they can approach it in a way that's authentic to them and that's what makes the best story. Baltin: Going back to the opening question, why publicity, how'd you get into this? Singerff: I started off in business marketing. I actually was going to start off in fashion design and then I had a change of heart, and I went into business marketing. I started interning at magazines and I interned at a travel magazine. I was heading up the food section and I did an internship with a fashion blog website. This was in 2008, so it was the time that they were all really surfacing and becoming big; I coordinated all the photoshoots and production side of things. I minored in journalism. So, that's the area I thought I was going to go into. I got an internship with a Canadian woman's wear brand called Joseph Ribkoff in Montreal on their PR team. After just a couple of weeks, they offered me the job and I was off. My career in PR started then. Baltin: What did you like about it? Singerff: What I love about PR is that I'm still working with magazines and publishers and journalists, and I'm still getting to create stories and create the narratives, but I'm on another side of it, which back then, I don't think I knew existed. I didn't know what that would mean, that it would put all of my interests in this perfectly aligned way that actually was a career for me. It was just a happy accident that I ended up in PR and then I realized, 'Oh, I still get to work with all the people I've been working with up until this point, but from a different perspective. I loved it. I fell in love with PR from day one. I started off in fashion PR. I was traveling to Europe multiple times a year. I was doing the shows in Europe. I was working with stylists and photographers and lots of editors and fashion magazines and creating stories out of clothing. I just fell in love with the process of branding and getting to tell a brand's story. I also fell in love with traveling and getting to connect with so many different kinds of people. That is a huge plus of PR, of marketing in general, being in the industry and having the opportunity to meet as many people as you do and it's a big passion of mine. Any publicist would probably say the same thing. We're social butterflies. Baltin: What do you want to achieve as a publicist? Singerff: You ultimately want to feel really content and proud of your own work and you want to make sure you're doing everything ethically and you're doing it in a way that is delivering a lot of pride for the person that you're representing. So being successful is accomplishing that and having the ability to do your job and do it great, and instill confidence in others that are watching you do it because I think leading by example and having some sort of positive impact on others is one of the highest forms of feeling proud of your work and just telling great f**king stories with great people. That's successful to me.
