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Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sarah Jessica Parker Asked Her Agent To 'Get Me Out' Of ‘Sex & the City' After Pilot
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. More from Deadline 'And Just Like That …' Season 3: Everything We Know So Far Kristin Davis Says 'Sex & The City' Cast Was 'Scared' To Go Nude On Show: 'Would We Be Shunned?' Bong Joon Ho's 'Mickey 17' Sets HBO Max Premiere Date 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.' 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. Best of Deadline Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds 'Nine Perfect Strangers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? Everything We Know About Ari Aster's 'Eddington' So Far
Irish Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Candace Bushnell at The Ambassador: A fun, girly night out for Sex and the City fans
Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success, and Sex and the City The Ambassador Theatre ★★★☆☆ If you saw an uncanny number of kitten-heeled Carrie Bradshaw-lookalikes hotfooting it up O'Connell Street on Tuesday evening, they were likely making their way to The Ambassador Theatre for Candace Bushnell's one-woman show. All that was missing from the scene was a Dublin Bus emblazoned with Bushnell's face, (as in the opening credits to Sex and the City, when Sarah Jessica Parker spies her larger-than-life image). For the uninitiated, the Sex and the City TV series was based on Busnhell's book of the same name, an anthology of some of her juiciest New York Observer columns about women in their 30s navigating sex, dating, friendships and 'trying to have it all' in New York City . The series caught the zeitgeist of the 1990s, with the leading characters' names becoming a shorthand for personality traits à la, 'She's a total Miranda by day but she can be a bit of a Samantha after a few drinks'. READ MORE So did Bushnell have three best friends just like Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda? She took to the stage in a red leather-look skater skirt with a matching red top and heels to answer this and other questions that fans of the series have been asking for years. And the answer: the three women feature an amalgamation of traits from Bushnell's wide circle of girlfriends. There are shades of confusion when Bushnell switches from addressing the crowd in her opening monologue to acting out a scene where she talks to friends on an old brick phone. It soon becomes clear that this is a choreographed performance rather than an off-the-cuff Q&A-style event. Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City at the Ambassador, Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City at the Ambassador, Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City at the Ambassador, Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw There is some built-in crowd interaction though, when she switches to gameshow host mode for Real or Not Real? Did she date a senator like Bradshaw did in the series? Real! Did she also meet Matthew McConaughey in LA? Real! Did he say 'I really want to 'bleep' you, baby' to her like he does to Bradshaw in the series? Not real! With the crowd settled, using a screen of slides as a visual aid, Bushnell goes into her life story, from her 'mini fashionista' days growing up in Connecticut, when she began calling herself Candi with an 'I', to when she decided to move to the big city and become a writer with just $20 to her name. When she arrives in New York, she calls a much older Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who had told her he could look her up if she was in the city. He invites her to his luxurious apartment and she stays there for a chunk of time, working on short stories. However, shockingly, their relationship deteriorates, and she ends up sleeping on a wad of foam on the floor of a friend's apartment. In perhaps the most successful set-piece of the show, Bushnell acts out going to the Manolo Blahnik store to buy a pair of black leather boots on credit that a confidante had assured her would change her life. She then high tails it to the New York Observer offices and climbs countless town house steps with her cumbersome purchase to interview for a gossip columnist job. She's up against a man 'with a wife and kids to support' and loses out to him. Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City at the Ambassador, Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City at the Ambassador, Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw Her hopes for her 'big break' are crushed, until she gets a call from the editor offering her the chance to write her own column on single women in New York City. Worried about what her conservative parents would think of her visiting sex clubs and the like for column fodder, she creates an alter ego. And just like that ... Carrie Bradshaw was born. For the second part of the show, Bushnell dons a stunning lavender dress with feathery cuffs to talk about the thrill of seeing the Sex and the City TV series come to fruition. She goes on to describe what she did next, writing books such as Four Blondes, Lipstick Jungle and The Carrie Diaries, the last two of which also became successful TV series, although they didn't quite reach the heights of Sex and the City. She talks about her 10-year marriage to a ballet dancer that ended in divorce and concludes with the lesson: your girlfriends are the ones who are there for you no matter what. This generates a cheer from the crowd of friend groups, siblings and mums with their grown-up kids, for whom Sex and the City has been a major cultural touchstone. [ 20 years on: the complicated legacy of Sex and the City Opens in new window ] Although there was nothing revelatory in Bushnell's show, it was a fun, girlie night out. It was just a shame she didn't indulge the bubbly Dublin crowd with a Q&A section.
Washington Post
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Graydon Carter dishes about his glory days at Spy and Vanity Fair
Yes, of course there's tea — or dish, as the old folks say. This is Graydon, after all. Deep, deep dish. Kurt Vonnegut commanding a foe to get cancer. An apoplectic John Gregory Dunne ranting about actresses 'dressed like sluts.' Magazine magnate Si Newhouse being good in bed. Waltzing, stumbling, dining, wining and twerking through 'When the Going Was Good,' Graydon Carter's memoir of his editorial glory days astride the New York Observer, Spy and Vanity Fair, are witty people doing anecdotal things. Vonnegut once told Carter that his wife didn't drop names; she merely 'had a lot of famous friends and liked to talk about them.' The same is voluptuously true of Carter, and you'll like the book largely to the degree that name-dropping doesn't bug you. In any case, each of the friends comes fitted with a mononym — Tina, Barry, Nora, Fran, Hitch — that readers will either not recognize or recognize so profoundly that they'll refuse to accept that these are no longer boldface names.
