Sex and the City icon Kim Cattrall breaks silence on divisive reboot And Just Like That
Sex and the City stars Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Sarah Jessica Parker attend the seventh Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, 2001. (Liaison / Chris Weeks)
Award-winning actor and Nintendo enthusiast Kim Cattrall has broken her silence on Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That… – and she didn’t hold back.
Cattrall is best-known for playing PR glamourpuss, unabashed sexpot and foulmouthed icon Samantha Jones across sex seasons and two film adaptations of Sex and the City.
But the star turned down a chance to appear in a third movie in 2017 – “Thank you,” she told showrunners at the time, “but no, I’m good” – meaning her absence from the 2021 reboot And Just Like That… came as little surprise.
Speaking to Variety, as part of the publication’s Power of Women issue, Cattrall explained that “the way forward seemed clear” when it came to her decision to quit the smash hit franchise.
“It’s a great wisdom to know when enough is enough,” she said. “I also didn’t want to compromise what the show was to me.”
The reboot materialised without her and Kim Cattrall told Variety that she found out about And Just Like That… “like everyone else did – on social media”.
“I was never asked to be part of the reboot,” she added, “I made my feelings clear after the possible third movie.
“The series is basically the third movie. That’s how creative it was.”
Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall. (Michael Tran/AFP via Getty Images)
Third Sex and the City movie involved ‘heartbreaking’ storyline for Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones
The star also confirmed that Samantha’s storyline for a potential third movie involved her receiving unwanted d**k pics from Miranda’s 14-year-old son Brady, describing the vision for her character as “heartbreaking”.
She continued: “Why can’t Samantha, who owns her own PR company – maybe she had to sell it because of financial woes? 2008 was tough. Some people are still recovering. She had to sell it to some guy who’s wearing a hoodie, and that’s the dilemma she has. I mean that’s a scenario that was kind of off the top of one of my reps’ heads, and I thought that’s a great idea.
“That’s a conflict. Instead of an underage boy’s…”
Cattrall also explained that parts of Samantha are still with her today – “I played her, and I loved her. And I feel ultimately protective of her” – but after the second movie, “Everything in me went, ‘I’m done.'”
Having been such an integral part of the franchise it was always going to be difficult to explain Samantha’s absence from And Just Like That… In the end, writers settled on Samantha moving to London after a fall-out, leaving her estranged from Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis). The storyline claimed that Samantha had gotten mad at Carrie after she stopped paying her to be her publicist.
Kim Cattrall said that she hadn’t seen any of the reboot but she’d “certainly heard about it” and that it feels “odd” that the character continued without her.
“I don’t know how to feel about it,” she said. “It’s so finite for me, so it doesn’t continue. I think I would ponder it more if I didn’t have something like Queer as Folk or How I Met Your Father. That’s kind of where I’m centred around now. This feels like an echo of the past.
“Other than the really wonderful feeling of – and it’s rare in my business – people wanting more, especially at 65. That feels powerful, that I’ve left something behind that I’m so proud of. I loved her. I loved her so, so, so much. It’s tough competition. The original show is in all of our imaginations. But for me, [the break] feels clean.”
