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The Vancouver-raised actress, who plays cocktail teaser Samantha on Bravo's racy Friday night comedy Sex In The City, was in Toronto yesterday promoting the series. We sent a photographer up to her hotel room, but she sent him back.
"I'm a little under the weather," she said, looking at least a decade younger than her 43 years. She tried hard to look less radiant, running her fingers through her perfectly styled, honey-flecked hair.
"It's just been so cold in New York," says Cattrall, who lives there with hubby Mark Levinson, an audio electronic executive. "I have this little fisherman's shack outside of East Hamptons and before I came up here, I lost my cat and I got a bit of a sniffle..."
Uh-huh. No pix.
The good news is Cattrall found the cat.
The really good news is that a third season of the wonderfully catty comedy is in the works.
The series stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon and Cattrall as four smart and sexy thirtysomething women on the prowl for love and adventure in the Big Apple.
Cattrall initially turned down the role of the uninhibited public relations whiz when it was offered by executive producer Darren Starr (Melrose Place).
Held out on series
Even after Parker signed, Cattrall still demurred. She didn't want to give up her film career and wasn't sure she wanted to move back to New York.
Another actress was signed and production was two weeks away. That's when a director friend called Cattrall and told her she was making a huge mistake.
She met again with Starr, who promised to stick to a short, film-friendly production schedule of 18 weeks a year. He also convinced her that Samantha was going to be much more than the man-hungry character outlined in the pilot script.
"Sure she wants great sex," says Cattrall. "But what she really wants is to be held in the morning. I think that's what makes her character empathetic. She has a really big heart and she wants to be loved.
"The other girls have an equally voracious appetite," adds Cattrall, "but the thing about Samantha is that she doesn't labour about it. She didn't become a very successful New York P.R. person without going out and getting what she wants."
Cattrall feels the four characters make up one complete person. "You can have a Samantha night, a Miranda day, a Charlotte morning and you can have Carrie who just wants to put it all down," she says.
'Hot woman'
Cattrall was recently named "hot woman of a certain age" by Rolling Stone magazine. Why not, she says.
"I think that 40 looks different than it did when my mother was 40. I eat well, I exercise and I'm much more conscious of what's going on in my life."
Besides, Baby Boomers want to be entertained by men and women they can relate to, says Cattrall. "I want to see stories about mid-life crisis, because all of us go through one sooner or later."
Male viewers in particular should think of the show as a service, says Cattrall. She recalls one steamy bedroom scene where Samantha impatiently asks the man of the moment, "'Do you know where it is?' And he says, 'Of course I do, I'm not a chump.' And she says to him, 'It's actually two inches from where you think it is.'
"To me, that's the great thing about the series. It's entertaining but it's also informative."