With her flighty effervescence, charm, razor-sharp sense of humor, and eclectic style, it’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Sarah Jessica Parker playing the incomparable Carrie Bradshaw. But now, two of the actor’s Sex and the City co-stars, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis, have revealed that the era-defining comedy could’ve looked very different indeed—turns out, they were both asked to read for the iconic part of the single and fabulous sex columnist.
On a special bonus episode of the And Just Like That… The Writers Room podcast, released to mark the 25th anniversary of the original show, Parker, Nixon, and Davis joined And Just Like That’s showrunner, Michael Patrick King, to spill two-and-a-half-decades’ worth of secrets. On the agenda? The actors being quizzed on their blink-and-you-miss-them Sex and the City love interests; their most memorable scenes (including Carrie pelting Big with her wedding bouquet after being jilted); scrapped storylines (apparently Charlotte was supposed to be pregnant at the same time as Miranda, before her arc was rewritten); and who else they might have played on the show.
Sex and the City’s creator Darren Star had already worked with Davis on Melrose Place, and so, she says on the episode, “He sent me the script [for Sex and the City], the talk of the town at the time, and called me and said: ‘We really want Sarah Jessica but she may not do it so will you read for Carrie?’” Davis, however, was immediately skeptical. “In the original script, Carrie was much more like Candace [Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City],” she continues. “She smoked and she swore. And I remember one line in the script: It said ‘Carrie has the body of Heather Locklear and the mind of Dorothy Parker.’ I was like, ‘That is adorable but I can’t play that part! What’re you thinking?’ I was like [to Star], ‘I can’t play Carrie. I can’t even read for Carrie. I am this other girl, who’s underwritten but I understand her.’ He was like, ‘Oh, okay.’”
Nixon, funnily enough, was in a similar position. “They brought me in to audition for Carrie,” she says. “I auditioned and they were like, ‘Yeah, not so much.’ But, in the first two seasons, there were all these people who’d speak to the camera. I’m not usually this proactive but, at the time, it seemed like there weren’t four women—there were like seven. And I was like, ‘This is a show that shoots in New York—this never happens! There’s got to be one of those women I could play. Couldn’t they see me for somebody else?’ So, they came back and they said, ‘Yeah, read for Miranda.’ They auditioned me a lot of times—I don’t know how many times—and then… nothing. After months of badgering them, my manager cried on the phone. She was like, ‘You guys are crazy. This is the person you want for the part.’ Then, they said yes.”
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