Sarah Jessica Parker gave a lengthy interview to The Telegraph’s weekend magazine, Stella. Over the years, I’ve kind of grown to hate SJP’s interviews, which are generally filled with SJ trying much, much too hard to seem relatable and/or super-intellectual. She’s neither. This Telegraph piece has some of that too, but this is one of the more subdued pieces I’ve read with SJP in a while. I’d like to think that she’s trying out a new shtick after I Don’t Know How She Does It bombed at the box office – the girlish, frenetic “Look at me in this couture, buy these shoes, I don’t have a nanny, I swear but I work constantly for you!” thing has worn thin. You can read the full Telegraph piece here, and here are some highlights:
Her real life wardrobe and shopping: “anything I can put on quickly and not embarrass my son in.” She does not share Carrie’s insatiable appetite for shoes, nor her pursuit of material possessions in general. She’s already done her Christmas shopping, yet says, ‘I cringe inside when anybody gives me something. I don’t know why. I just get embarrassed.’
Why she still works non-stop: ‘For me it has been hard to say no [to work]. I wanted a family but before I had a family I was a career person. I’ve tried to marry those two things and sometimes it is successful and sometimes it is not.’
Matthew Broderick does the food shopping: ‘He does lots in the house,’ she agrees. ‘He shops for me a lot and he cooks for all of us. There are a lot of things he does better than I do, so it balances itself out. I don’t feel taken advantage of. We take care of each other.’
A real marriage: ‘We’ve been together for 20 years and you have good days, you have decent days, and you have bad days. That’s a marriage. That’s a relationship. That’s a friendship, even – relationships outside the marriage run the same course. If you’re in it for the long haul and you want meaningful relationships you are going to go through lots of different periods.’
On her kids: Parker shudders slightly at the thought of her own children becoming difficult teenagers. She and Broderick have a son, James Wilkie, eight, and two-year-old twins, Marion Loretta Elwell and Tabitha Hodge, known as Kitty and Babe. ‘When James was born the paediatrician called him a hothouse flower,’ she says, because he was so delicate. And what did she say of the twins? ‘That one of them was going to look after me and hold my hand at the end and the other one was going to arrange the funeral.’
The twins are SJP & Broderick’s biological kids: The twins were conceived using eggs that Parker had previously frozen and Broderick’s sperm, and carried by a surrogate. She says that she ‘tried and tried and tried’ to get pregnant ‘but it just wasn’t meant to be in the conventional way’. Was it very different meeting her children rather than giving birth to them? ‘Yes, definitely. You don’t know them as well immediately as you do a child you’ve given birth to. But you do have an immediate love and affection for them and what is instinctual happens.’
Going from one kid to three: None the less, ‘going from one to three children is a much bigger adjustment than becoming a mother in the first place. One child in retrospect seems a cake walk compared to where I stand today.’ Did it change her marriage? ‘Kids can really distract you from your relationship,’ she says. ‘Maybe in good ways and bad ways. It’s important to have all eyes on all parts of the relationship. It’s something you really have to pay attention to. But you figure it out.’
Leaving the newborn twins to film SATC 2 in Morocco: ‘That was rough,’ she says. ‘That was really distressing. You just hope that your children are not terrifically disrupted by the choices you make.’
Did she instantly know Broderick was the person she would marry? ‘I don’t know that I thought about that right away. I met this wonderful person and we wanted to be together. And after a while it became apparent that I wanted to be with him longer than temporarily.’
Insecurities: ‘I think insecurities change and evolve as time marches on and new concerns creep up. Children provide a whole new set of concerns. Who knows what I’ll be insecure about next week. I always have insecurities. A lot of them about work and how it will be received.’
Insecurities about aging: ‘I try to dress appropriately for my age and I’m a realist about what I look like. But if those physical things were my insecurities I’d be thrilled. What wonderful problems. My insecurities are more substantial than that. I worry first and foremost about my children and their health. My husband, and his. I worry about what work opportunities will come up. My own creative satisfaction. How will I pursue things and will the work be good?’
On Botox: ‘There are women [in television and in Hollywood] who feel that Botox is necessary, but more and more I don’t think it is important for the industry. People want to make movies that are successful, and sometimes they include women and sometimes they don’t. I think it’s less and less about exterior. At least I hope so.’ She smiles. ‘I’m an eternal optimist.’
[From The Telegraph]
That’s interesting that she confirmed that she’s the twins’ biological mother too – I don’t think she’s ever confirmed that, right? Or maybe I just forgot about it. I kind of like how everyone keeps bringing up the fact that she left her newborn twins for months to film SATC 2 – she keeps getting questions about it, ever since she breezed by that fact in a Vogue interview, interspersed with quotes about what a hands-on mom she is. But seriously, isn’t this interview one of SJP’s better ones? She doesn’t seem so cloying and cutesy here. She seems almost real. Except for all the stuff about how she dresses her age (she doesn’t) and how she doesn’t care about getting dressed up (she cares – A LOT).
Photos courtesy of Fame.
