Cynthia Nixon on fixing Sex and the City's diversity problem in the show's reboot
In a Q interview, the actor also talks about the evolution of her character, Miranda
After Sex and the City ended in 2004, Cynthia Nixon couldn't imagine doing a reboot.
"I never thought there would be a movie," the actor says in an interview on Q with Tom Power. "And then I never thought there would be a second movie. I just always think we're done."
But when Nixon got a call from director Michael Patrick King asking her to reprise her role as Miranda Hobbes in a new revival series, titled And Just Like That, her reluctance shifted to excitement — with one major caveat.
"Something that had always really bothered me was how white a show [the original series] was," Nixon tells Power. "I grew up in New York. I'm from New York. And New York is not a white city. We got a lot of white people here, but we got a lot of everybody else, too. So I was trying to imagine how we were going to change that.
"I kept saying to Michael Patrick King, 'You keep telling me we're going to make really big changes, but I'm scared that I'm going to show up and it's going to be exactly the same house just with different wallpaper and different carpet.' And he'd keep saying, 'Nope, nope, that house is done. We're building a whole new house.' At a certain point, it was just a leap of faith, but he did exactly what he said."
Many things from Sex and the City have changed in And Just Like That, which had its Season 2 premiere last week. Nixon's character, Miranda, underwent a huge transformation that saw her leave her job as a corporate lawyer to pursue a graduate degree in human rights.
WATCH | Official trailer for And Just Like That Season 2:
"Miranda is really opinionated," Nixon says about the evolution of her character. "She's really kind of ferocious. She's a little aggressive and she's very sure of her opinions, but there's also a fair amount of bluster that comes with it. Back in the day, she was very cynical and very quippy and kind of shunned a lot of the traditional female things, like motherhood and marriage and domesticity in general.
"When we pick her up in the new series, she's been married for a long time, and the marriage has kind of gone stale. She's just trying to be a good sport, but she feels really trapped…. Miranda is like, 'Look what's happening: the world is burning, look at Trump, look at global warming, look at all this racism and xenophobia and homophobia. This is the last moment that I want to be sitting in my house and, you know, eating hot fudge sundaes.'"
Another big change for Miranda is that she leaves her husband from the original series, Steve Brady, to explore a queer relationship in And Just Like That. For Nixon, who came out as queer in 2004, and has been married to Christine Marinoni since 2012, this "seemed like an easy and sort of natural choice."
"I thought, 'Well, you know, we're trying to bring in … all kinds of diversity, including, gender and sexual orientation diversity. And so why not?" she says. "Like, I'm a queer woman. Why not have [Miranda], you know, find her way into that?"
When asked about her own sense of responsibility regarding the show's impact, Nixon responds that it's "enormously important" to have queer representation in the arts.
"I think that the most important thing always seems to be — in terms of changing people's hearts and minds — is to come out to people you actually know," she says. "Just barely below that is to have accurate representation of LGBT people on television films, books and stage."
The full interview with Cynthia Nixon is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Cynthia Nixon produced by Vanessa Nigro.
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