Cynthia Nixon is, in my opinion, the most talented person in the Sex and the City/And Just Like That franchise. Nixon was always a working actress and she approached the franchise as something fun and light, a good paycheck in between theater gigs and more interesting work. Over the years, she seems to have embraced the fact that Miranda Hobbes is her most recognizable character and she leans into it without letting it define her (it helps that she’s also iconic on The Gilded Age!). Well, Cynthia has an interesting interview in Grazia to promote the third season of AJLT. Some highlights:

The mood among liberals in New York living under Trump 2.0. ‘It’s terrible. It’s very hard to even say: how are you?’ She shakes her head, lists a few things she is newly concerned about this week (‘Like, why would we need a Department of Education? Ha!’)…‘I’ve been throwing myself into a number of political things. You’re in despair all the time anyway, but either you’re in despair and paralysed, or there are things you’re working on.’

She insists that SATC is a feminist show: ‘[It was] a feminist show – it’s always been a feminist show. What you have to remember is that we were in our thirties and forties. Of course, I look at the show now, we look like babies, but being single at that age, at that time, still had a kind of stigma.’ Its central message was unheard of: ‘You can be a woman, you can have a lot of sex with a lot of different people. It didn’t make you a slut and it didn’t mean you were using sex to get something. You were having sex – because you enjoyed having sex!’

How people’s perceptions of Miranda have changed: ‘People used to see her as very didactic and strident and humourless,’ says Nixon. In recent years, however, she has developed a cult following, and many fans are firmly Team Miranda. Nixon has noticed the shift. ‘Stuff she was ballyhooing from the rooftops, I think, became common wisdom. The culture did sort of move to meet where Miranda was standing…I mean, that has been true in recent history. Of course, in America, and I think in many places, the world is moving again. Away from a lot of the feminist ideas that Miranda had.’

She did a big SATC rewatch before AJLT: She felt that 90% was ‘still pretty great’, but ‘certain things have really not aged well’. Even at the time, ‘it was always very difficult being on a show that was so white. I always hated that. When we would raise it, we were told: this is Candace Bushnell’s world and it’s a very white world. I’m like, OK…’ she says. Also, she says, ‘some of the trans stuff, some of the gay stuff was a little cringy to look at’.

The AJLT storyline of Miranda leaving husband Steve for the polarising Che Diaz: Nixon says the ‘poor Steve’ narrative ‘doesn’t really bother me. Our show always killed its darlings. If we’re just gonna play it safe and nice, why are you watching?’ Nixon, who suggested Sara Ramirez for the part of Che, says, ‘I love Che, I love Sara. It’s hard to know what people would have made of Che if Che hadn’t ostensibly broken up Steve and Miranda. But I don’t want a show in which everybody is behaving well all the time. A feminist show doesn’t show women being perfect.’

Women, ageing and child-rearing: ‘When you’re getting out of your childrearing years it is like a form of adolescence. You can return to yourself. There’s a lot more behind you than ahead of you. And so it’s like: how am I feeling about where I’ve got to so far? And if I don’t like it, am I going to do something about it?… I feel like there is a desire to have women who are of childbearing age, sort of bland and sane, because we don’t want women who are looking after children to be scary and complicated.’

[From Grazia]

She’s right about SATC being radical at the time – you have to understand, it was about Gen X women in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s who were materialistic, fun, immature, flawed and really screwed up about love and sex. While it was far from a perfect representation, I absolutely agree that the show was groundbreaking at the time. It reminded a lot of women that they didn’t have to have everything figured out by the age of 30, that there is a lot of life to be lived. As Nixon says, though, there are some really problematic episodes, but that’s true for most shows from the ‘90s (coughFriendscough). What Cynthia says about the representations of “childrearing” women is really dead-on as well.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.