Truth is, Sarah Jessica Parker didn’t relate to Carrie Bradshaw all that much
It’s been almost 12 years (!!!) since the final episode of our beloved Sex and the City aired on TV, yet we’re still finding out so many new factoids about the show we all know and love. For example, just last week, the show’s director Cynthia Nixon opened up about the fact that all of the wild, wacky, crazy things that happened in the show are based on real events. And now, Sarah Jessica Parker is talking about her relationship to the one and only Carrie Bradshaw.
The Wall Street Journal asked six influential people, including Sarah Jessica, about the topic of transformation and what it means to them. For most who work in the acting business, transformation is majorly important — after all, you have to become your character to create a convincing and successful show or film. Although many of us tend to project our view of the character onto our view of the actor/actress, Sarah Jessica is here to say that her transformation into Carrie for every episode took a lot of work, because she couldn’t relate to her at all.
“I love the process of becoming somebody else, but the work to become so, and to be convincing, is still very challenging,” she said. “Every project is brand new and scary. People probably don’t realize that Carrie Bradshaw was radically different from who I was, who I continue to be.”
It wasn’t easy to put herself in Carrie’s designer shoes each and every day, SJP explained. “I think that sometimes because we look alike and live in the same city and haunt the same neighborhoods, that it was sort of like I was playing in the sandbox, when in truth it took real work every day to be her, to understand her, to not judge her,” she said.
Now, Sarah Jessica is in a new HBO series, entitled Divorce, and she’s finding herself struggling in the same way as she did while playing Carrie. “The character I’m playing is incredibly different from me in many ways — she handles complexity differently than I do, her marriage is different from my own, and she’s struggling financially in a way that I don’t at this point in my life,” she said. “But that’s what I love. I still love the idea of being somebody else.”
We’re so glad you stuck with Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica, because your transformation is one we’ll remember for a lifetime. <3
Related reading:
Turns out, the majority of ‘Sex and the City’ was based on real events
(Image via HBO)
