Sarah Jessica Parker is well-known for her role in Sex and the City. But there was a time when she was against appearing in the show.
Explaining the reason, she told the Are You a Charlotte? Podcast that she wanted to have a “journeyman” career, meaning appearing in films, TV specials, and plays instead of a long-term commitment to a show.
The 60-year-old recalled that she had filmed the pilot in 1997 but forgot until HBO green-lighted the series.
“I panicked,” she remembered. “When the show was picked up, I was like, ‘I can’t be on a TV show! I don’t think I’m suited for that life.”
Sarah shared that her reaction stemmed from her experience working on the 1980s high school comedy Square Pegs, which “also kind of depressed me.”
“I think that it was the idea of doing the same thing over and over and over again,” she continued. “I think I’d always been lucky that I got to be on a television series and then it was over.”
“Like, I met great people, had a great experience, worked with great actors, great directors, thought the stories were interesting, wanted to do the shows, and they had shorter lives, maybe one or two seasons,” the Hocus Pocus star added.
Sarah noted, “And then I moved on and I would do a play or I’d do some readings, and then I’d do a part in a movie, and then I’d do, you know, a movie of the week. And I just kind of bounced around and I really thought, ‘That is the goal. The journeyman is the goal. You want to be moving.”
“So the idea of a television series meant that I couldn’t do all those things,” before admitting that she was wrong for thinking that way because actors “can still do [other] things on their hiatuses,” the actress said.
Sarah even recounted how she asked her agent, “Can you get me out of this?’ and even offered to do anything else for HBO if it meant not having to commit to SATC. “I said, ‘I will give my services to HBO to fulfill my contract. So, any movies, I’ll do for X number of years.”
But her agent soothed her anxieties. “He said, ‘It can be wonderful. It can be great.’ And the beauty of HBO [at the time] was that it was kind of an unknown species … and [former HBO chairman] Chris Albrecht said, ‘Do it for a year, and if you don’t want to do it anymore, we don’t do it.'”
The rest is history. Sarah’s role as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City became her career-defining role.
