Actor Kristin Davis recently opened up about a pivotal moment in 1997 when she briefly questioned Sarah Jessica Parker’s enthusiasm for the hit American show Sex and the City during its early days. On her rewatch podcast, Are You a Charlotte?, Davis revisited the uncertain period after the pilot had been filmed and HBO had yet to decide whether to green light the show for a full season. For Davis, this was a time of intense anticipation and nervous energy.
“They had 18 months to decide, something like that. Maybe just a year. Whatever it was felt like eternity, and I would call my poor manager, Dave, every day and be like, ‘Did you hear anything? Did you hear anything?’ ” Davis shared.
She then recalled living in Los Angeles during that time, where a chance encounter with Parker left her feeling uneasy about Parker’s commitment to the role of Carrie Bradshaw. “I said, ‘Did you hear anything?’ And she was like, ‘No,’” Davis recounted. She admitted that Parker didn’t seem as concerned about the show’s fate as she was. “And I said, ‘Well, don’t you want it to be picked up?’ And she said something like, ‘Yeah. But I could tell she was just trying to please me. You know what I mean?,’” Davis continued.
In that moment, Davis feared the worst. “I thought, ‘Oh, no. Sarah Jessica doesn’t want to do it,’” she said. Reflecting on it now, however, Davis attributes Parker’s attitude to her hesitation about making a long-term commitment to a television series.
“We did have these massive seven-year-long contracts, which is the norm for any kind of pilot,” Davis explained. For Parker, the commitment would have marked a significant shift in her career trajectory. “She’d been kind of just this, you know, journeyman actress in a way, like, doing Broadway, you know, doing movies like Honeymoon in Vegas,” Davis noted.
However, Davis now believes that Parker’s reluctance wasn’t about the show itself but more about the implications of committing to a long-running series. “I believe her nervousness was, ‘Do I really wanna be committed? Do I wanna be tied down?’” she said. “It wasn’t something that most actors like — you didn’t start to be an actor because you wanted to do one job for 30 years.”
In the end, Parker embraced the role of Carrie Bradshaw, becoming the heart of the series and a cultural icon in her own right. For Davis, the early doubts and anxieties now seem like a distant memory, overshadowed by the legacy of Sex and the City and the enduring bond she shares with her co-stars from the show.