Sarah Jessica Parker Opens Up About Deleted Sex And The City Scene That Could Have Been A Game-Changer For Carrie
Sarah Jessica Parker is lifting the lid on a deleted Sex And The City scene that would have given viewers more of an insight into her character’s background.
The Emmy winner played Carrie Bradshaw in all six seasons of Sex And The City, as well as its two spin-off films and the revival series And Just Like That.
Ahead of And Just Like That’s return, HuffPost UK spoke to Sarah Jessica about the fact that, despite Carrie having been on our screens for the better part of 30 years, there are still a lot of question marks around the character’s back story.
SJP explained that there has always been a “very conscious effort” to not shed too much light on any of the characters’ introduced in Sex And The City personal histories, but especially Carrie.
“There was a moment that we had a father for Carrie,” she recalled. “There was a scene shot where Carrie opens a desk drawer, and looks down and sees a photograph of her father, and shuts the drawer. And we cut it from the show.”
According to Sarah Jessica, showrunner Michael Patrick King opted to ditch the small scene as he felt it would have “complicated” the story, and might have “eclipsed” and “dominated” the bigger picture.
“I could not agree more,” she said. “There is a sort of alternate universe in which she lives, in which back story doesn’t exist.
“So, we’re not endowing her with qualities because... or saying she behaves this way because... or a parent or mother parented her this way and that’s why [she had] this response.
“[This approach is] so clean, and it kind of gives you more liberty to tell a story. Because in some ways, once you start introducing families, and the ways in which they’ve informed somebody, you lock yourself into, like, pathologies and choices and eccentricities.”
Carrie did briefly touch on her family life in season four of Sex And The City, when she disclosed that her father left the family home when she was a child.
“Do you think it really can be as simple as, ‘My father walked out, therefore I’ll always be messed up about men?‘’,” she asked Miranda in the episode A Vogue Idea, who responded: “My father came home every night at seven on the dot, and I have no clue about men either.”
The first two episodes of And Just Like That season three are now streaming on Sky and Now in the UK, with new instalments coming every Friday.
More interviews with the And Just Like That cast will be published on HuffPost UK in the coming days.