How catty ‘Sex And The City’ cast fights led to Kim Cattrall’s exile
They might have played the best of friends on the show, but there were many catfights behind the scenes of Sex And The City.
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For six seasons of Sex And The City and two movies, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte met weekly in Manhattan for brunch to giggle and gab over mimosas.
The best friends led fabulous lives. Donning designer duds, they would hit every downtown party late into the night, snag New York’s hottest men and cry on each other’s shoulders when those men turned out to be pigs. Burgers and Bigs came and went, but the core quartet was rock solid.
“Maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates,” says Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, in one Sex And The City episode.
A nice thought. But fans couldn’t help but wonder: If that were true, why is Kim Cattrall, who plays Samantha on the original show, being left out of the revival HBO Max series, And Just Like That, which was announced last week? The show, which will hit streaming locally on Binge, is said to delve into the complexities of the ladies’ NYC lives in their 50s – but not that of PR powerhouse Samantha Jones, a pop culture icon.
Diehards were devastated. Where the other characters get caught up in dramatic tailspins and career woes over the years – a sad Carrie dining alone on her 35th birthday at Il Cantinori; a frazzled Miranda navigating life as a single mum and lawyer – Samantha is all sex and fun. Her average plot line centres around “Should I bed this Staten Island firefighter?” (She does.)
The And Just Like That slight was all too familiar. Two years ago, Kristin Davis, 55, who plays prissy Upper Eastsider Charlotte, posted a nostalgic photo on Instagram from the 2004 Emmy Awards, showing herself, Parker and Cynthia Nixon (who plays Miranda) beaming next to two glistening statuettes – won by Parker and Nixon for their performances. Nowhere to be seen? Cattrall.
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“Super happy memories and wishing joy to everyone tonight,” Davis’ caption coos. “We are all so incredibly lucky to get to do what we do!”
That night, a party was thrown for the final season, and, as Page Six reported at the time, Cattrall was the only one of the four to not be invited because she had yet to sign onto the planned film. (She eventually did, and it was released in 2008.) The whole evening, Cattrall was persona non grata in a pink Pamella Roland gown.
“No one talked to Kim except for when [Parker] won her award and kissed her,” a source said. “That kiss was staged.”
While on-screen the actresses were all smiles and puns, once the camera stopped rolling, they had knives behind their backs.
Cattrall and Parker’s long-brewing feud was laid bare for all to see in 2018, when Cattrall’s missing brother, Christopher, was found dead in Canada. The actress, now 64, took to Instagram to call out Parker, 55, who had brought up the tragedy in a TV interview.
“My Mum asked me today, ‘When will that @sarahjessicaparker, that hypocrite, leave you alone?’” Cattrall wrote in the caption. “Your continuous reaching out is a painful reminder of how cruel you really were then and now. Let me make this VERY clear. (If I haven’t already.) You are not my family. You are not my friend. So I’m writing to tell you one last time to stop exploiting our tragedy in order to restore your ‘nice girl’ persona.”
She then told her followers to “copy and paste [the] link” to a Post story, “Inside the mean girls culture that destroyed ‘Sex And The City.’”
Cattrall never took down that Instagram post.
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Beyond the fisticuffs, there were smaller slaps along the way.
The Post’s Cindy Adams reported in 2009 that, during the nearly two months when the women were filming “Sex and the City 2” in Morocco, there was no friendly socialising off-screen. They even stayed in separate luxury hotels.
Cattrall and Davis were both at the Amanjena, Parker at La Mamounia and Nixon at the Es Saadi. One night, Cattrall and Davis had overlapping dinner reservations in the same restaurant, and didn’t sit with each other.
A similar scene reportedly played out during an earlier shoot in Atlantic City, NJ, when Parker rented a house for her, Davis and Nixon, while Cattrall stayed on her own.
An HBO spokesman said at the time, “Kim stayed in a different house because she was married at the time, and her husband was supposed to come.”
When Nixon, 54, unsuccessfully ran for New York governor in 2018, Parker donated $5000 to the campaign, and Davis handed over $2000. Cattrall’s only endorsement came in a tweet: “I support & respect any former colleague’s right to make their own career choices.”
The remark was not out of character for the actress, who has, in the years since Sex And The City ended, maintained the gal-pal act was just for show.
“We’ve never been friends,” she told Piers Morgan in a 2017 interview. “We’ve been colleagues, and in some ways it’s a very healthy place to be, because then you have a clear line between your professional life and relationship and your personal.”
The remark stung Parker, who countered with her own version on Watch What Happens Live a few months later.
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“[I’m] just heartbroken,” Parker told host Andy Cohen. “I mean, that whole week, you and I spoke about it endlessly, because I was just, I don’t know, I found it very upsetting, because that’s not the way I recall our experience.”
But the final irony, perhaps, is Cattrall’s exclusion from the new 10-part HBO Max show, for which the actresses will reportedly rake in more than $1 million per episode. In the past, Cattrall had fought for better pay for herself and, in so doing, for her co-stars. Before the first film, a source told Page Six, “Kim’s been bragging to everyone that she held out for more money on the film and, in turn, got better salaries” for Davis and Nixon.
Page Six also reported in 2017 that a third film was on the brink of being made before Cattrall scuttled it.
“People were expecting to go to work,” a source said. “It’s true. They were supposed to start shooting [on Tuesday]. Kim was negotiating and was asking for things the studio wouldn’t go for, so they pulled the plug.”
Cattrall denies this, but tweeted at the time, “The only ‘DEMAND’ I ever made was that I didn’t want to do a 3rd film … & that was back in 2016.”
Parker has been keeping it polite about Cattrall being left out of the new show, but Carrie-like politeness didn’t stop her from referring to her former co-star in the past tense on Instagram after a fan commented that she’d “miss Kim/Samantha”.
“We will too,” Parker replied. “We loved her so.”
This article was originally published on the New York Post and is reproduced with permission
Originally published as How catty ‘Sex And The City’ cast fights led to Kim Cattrall’s exile
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