Just when I have a moment where I think “maybe Sarah Jessica Parker isn’t so bad,” she reminds me that she is, in fact, the worst. I only realized that SJP is the worst during the messiness with Kim Cattrall circa 2017-18. In the script for Sex and the City 3, there was a plot line involving Kim’s character Samantha and Miranda’s teenage son Brady. Kim gave the script a hard pass. That’s what set everything off – SJP was furious that Kim wouldn’t agree to do the movie, and SJP’s team ran to People Magazine, Us Weekly, Star, Andy Cohen and everyone else to scream and cry about how Kim “creates drama” and that she’s awful and unprofessional for not wanting to do the sequel. Kim has always dealt with everything directly, speaking about it openly in interviews and online, saying that SJP “could have been nicer” about the script, and then after the big smear campaign against her, Kim told SJP directly: you are not my friend, you are not my family. Since then, SJP has given multiple cloying “who me??” interviews where she played the victim and continued to villainize Kim. Well, Sarah Jessica still cannot f–king stand it that her goody-two-shoes image took a well-earned hit. She brought it up again in her Awards Chatter podcast interview:

Speaking to Scott Feinberg on THR’s Awards Chatter podcast, Parker acknowledged that “it’s very hard to talk about the situation with Kim,” but that she wanted “to kind of run through how it happened” to clarify why it is actually not the two-way “catfight” that the media has portrayed it to be. As she put it, “There has been one person talking.”

In Parker’s view, the issues with Cattrall may date back to 2017, when a third Sex and the City movie was being contemplated but “fell apart” over contractual demands that Cattrall made of Warner Bros., the studio which was to finance and distribute the film. (Reports at the time suggested that Cattrall made her participation contingent upon the studio greenlighting an unrelated project of hers.) “They didn’t feel comfortable meeting where she wanted to meet, and so we didn’t do the movie because we didn’t want to do it without Kim,” Parker recounted. “Were we [she and costars Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon] disappointed? Sure. But it happens.”

Then, however, Cattrall began publicly slamming Parker, accusing Parker of having behaved cruelly towards her during the original run of Sex and the City, claiming that the two had never really been friends [and saying the same of her relationship with Davis and Nixon] and even rebuffing Parker’s extension of condolences after Cattrall’s brother died in 2018.

“There were just a lot of public conversations about how she felt about the show,” Parker told Awards Chatter — conversations which Parker found “very painful” because they did not reflect “our experience” [meaning hers, Davis’s or Nixon’s] and because, she added, “I’ve spent a lot of years working really hard to always be decent to everybody on the set, to take care of people, to be responsible to and for people, both my employers and the people that I feel I’m responsible for as a producer of the show. And there just isn’t anyone else who’s ever talked about me this way.”

While Parker readily acknowledged that Cattrall “was a huge contributor to the success” of the Sex and the City series and films, she also explained, “We did not ask her to be part of this [And Just Like That…] because she made it clear that that wasn’t something she wanted to pursue, and it no longer felt comfortable for us, and so it didn’t occur to us. That’s not ‘slamming’ her, it’s just learning. You’ve got to listen to somebody, and if they’re publicly talking about something and it doesn’t suggest it’s some place they want to be, or a person they want to play, or an environment in which they want to be, you get to an age where you’re like, ‘Well, we hear that.’”

Parker further noted, “We felt comfortable moving on without her and without that part because we knew what Michael [Patrick King, the AJLT showrunner] wanted to do. And we thought he handled it beautifully.”

Parker concluded her remarks about Cattrall with a plea to the media to stop mischaracterizing what has occurred: “I just want to say one thing, because you’ve allowed me this opportunity: it’s so painful for people to keep talking about this ‘catfight’ — a ‘fight,’ a ‘fight,’ a ‘fight.’ I’ve never uttered fighting words in my life about anybody that I’ve worked with — ever. There is not a ‘fight’ going on. There has been no public dispute or spat or conversations or allegations made by me or anybody on my behalf. I wouldn’t do it. That is not the way I would have it. So I just wish that they would stop calling this a ‘catfight’ or an ‘argument,’ because it doesn’t reflect [reality]. There has been one person talking.”

[From THR]

“There has been one person talking,” she said, in what was easily her twentieth interview in which she addressed the controversy. While it’s technically true that SJP has not publicly “fought” with Cattrall, there absolutely was a full-tilt campaign against Cattrall the very moment she turned down the script. It was insane too, it was like Sarah Jessica and the producers were trying to publicly bully Kim into returning to the character. And as Cattrall has clearly said in interviews, they could have recast Samantha, or they could have given Samantha a much better storyline to help the character grow along with Kim. When SJP started executive-producing the SATC series, that’s when Samantha’s storylines took a hit. When the movies came around, Sam’s stories got even dumber. Weird how SJP has never addressed that.

As for Kim’s “contractual demands” – everyone was a little bit fuzzy about that at the time and still, to this day. I believe it went down this way: Kim knew she was done with SATC, but there was good money involved and she was curious about the script, so she waited until she saw the script. And that’s what made it easy for her – it was offensive to Samantha and so Kim turned it down. It was that simple. She didn’t want to do it. And SJP has been trying to villainize Kim ever since.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.