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 Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall and Cynthia Nixon star in Sex and the City: The Movie. |
NEW YORK -- Kim Cattrall is one Canadian girl who'd had enough of this city when Sex and the City called it quits four years ago.
Yes, she admits, her reluctance to return was a big part of why there wasn't a Sex and the City movie a lot earlier.
"I know I loved the character I was playing (the sex-crazed Samantha), I loved what the series was about and stood for."
"But at the same time I was going through a divorce (from husband Mark Levinson). I had been through another divorce, but it had been private and this one was incredibly public. I woke up one morning and it was in the (New York) Post. And this wasn't a column or a paragraph, it was on the front page with speculations about my personal life. I've been very honest about many things, but I really didn't feel this was anybody's business. It was tough for my family, too. And then my dad was diagnosed with dementia shortly after that, and that was the toughest thing of all.
"I realized I needed to take a time out. That's when I went back to Canada and started a little production company and decided I was going to spend less time in New York in the public eye and away fom my family. I was in Toronto for a while, then in Vancouver, and then I went over to England and did a couple of plays, where I have a lot of family there as well.
"I just don't know how I could have played Samantha at that time."
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Nor was it as if she was sitting by the phone waiting for the call. In England, Cattrall starred in productions of Whose Life Is It Anyway?, and the David Mamet play The Cryptogram, plus a John Boorman film called The Tiger's Tale with Brendan Gleeson, and the acclaimed telefilm My Boy Jack (about Rudyard Kipling's relationship with his son, played by Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe).
Then the clouds started to lift on her personal life.
"I think the time away from the city and the public eye made me feel stronger. A sure sign of me feeling better is I started to date," she says with a laugh. "And my dad was on medication in a really good facility, and at that time, the script (for Sex and the City: The Movie) came.
"Michael (director Michael Patrick King) says things happened for a reason, and during the time we didn't make the movie, the show went from DVD to (a cleaned-up primetime version on) TBS, and then it went all over the world. It was like we'd never been off the air."
Indeed, the first New York exterior shot for the movie was that trademark "walk" of the four principals, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha.
"And there were about 300 people around us screaming. It was like a fairytale. They were screaming the characters' names, they were screaming (SATC costume designer) Pat Fields' name, Michael Patrick King's, people who aren't even in front of the camera. They know this show inside and out."
Cattrall say she is glad she got another chance with Samantha to straighten out a series finale she didn't like -- which saw Samantha "settle down" in L.A. with her hunky client Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis).
"I didn't really buy the TV-show ending, it was a bit of a stretch (to see a monogamous Samantha), because I know her so well. But she does something, she does it all the way, and so you still see her doing it four years later, God love her."
Second thoughts abound in Sex and the City: The Movie, starting with Carrie and Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and the will-they-or-won't-they marriage plot, and working down to relationship pressures for Miranda and Steve and Samantha and Smith. Without playing spoiler, Cattrall does say "the way the movie ends is pretty much the way I envisioned the show would end."
She remains proud of Sex and the City on a couple of grounds.
"It was about a family that evolved. Through thick and thin, these women were there for each other, as opposed to most television shows and soap operas where women are tearing at each other."
Samantha, in particular, was a liberating character, Cattrall says.
"When the show hit, we'd been through AIDS, and a character like Samantha ... we needed somebody like that to say, 'Yes, have protected sex, don't be stupid.' But sex is part of life. It's something to be enjoyed. And why it should be left off the menu is beyond her."