Sarah Jessica & Parker Matthew Broderick
on being childhood stars, their happy homelife & a new Broadway play
“Our marriage is the one thing left that’s really and truly ours”
Matthew Broderick arrives first. His wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, wearing dark sunglasses and a radiant smile, enters about 10 minutes later. It’s day four of rehearsals for the Broadway revival of Plaza Suite. After this interview, the two are going to spend six hours portraying three different couples at various stages of their relationships. Then the long-wedded real-life pair will head to their townhouse in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan and…pretend like it didn’t happen. They don’t really take their work home.
“It doesn’t come up a lot,” says Broderick. “Maybe we’ll talk about it, but everybody needs a break to think about something else.”
“It’s not realistic,”Parker adds.“You walk in the door and there’s three children.” Interjects Broderick, “I forgot about them.”
Clearly, their chemistry doesn’t need any rehearsal. Squeezed on a velvet couch amid a scenery-strewn rehearsal room inside
“I remember thinking she was wonderful, hilarious and beautiful.”
a nondescript Midtown building, Parker, 55, and Broderick, 58, regularly finish each other’s sentences and laugh at each other’s jokes. At one point, he instinctively walks over to a desk to fetch her a tissue so she can wipe off the coffee mug ring left on the table.
Though they’re each veteran actors of some 40 years, Plaza
Suite—opening April 13 on Broadway—marks their first joint production since 1995. Adapted from a 1968 Neil Simon play (it was turned into a movie starring Walter Matthau in 1971 and an HBO film in 1982), the story consists of a trio of vignettes all set in a single suite of the famed Plaza Hotel in New York City. Parker and Broderick play three different couples: a longtime married couple on the brink of breakup; newly reconnected childhood sweethearts; and a husband and wife trying to cajole their jittery bride-to-be daughter out of the bathroom.
But Broderick and Parker don’t want audiences to read between
“It’s not like I had my sights set on him, but I was aware of him as an actor.”
the lines, even as they recite them. The parts they’re playing onstage aren’t anything like them. “I used to get uncomfortable watching a real couple have a romance onscreen,” he says. “But we are telling fictional stories.” Parker chimes in: “Doing a portrait of our lives has no interest to me. These characters’ choices are different, and they live in a different time and place.That’s why the idea of doing this was so interesting.”
New York Stories
Even though they’re both established movie and TV actors, it’s not quite accurate to refer to Broderick and Parker as a Hollywood couple, if only because of their deep roots in New York City. He was born in Manhattan to a playwright-painter mom and a theater actor father, James Broderick, who also worked on the 1970s TV drama series Family. Parker, meanwhile, was born in Nelsonville, Ohio. Her mom, a teacher, and her truckdriver stepfather, along with her siblings—she has seven in all—moved to a New York City suburb Jan. 1, 1977, when she was 11 years old.
All either of them has ever known is acting. A trained singer and dancer, Parker made her onstage debut in The Innocents in Boston in 1976 and took over the title role in the original Broadway production of the musical Annie in 1979. Broderick appeared off-Broadway in Torch Song
Trilogy in 1982 and won a Tony in 1983 for Simon’s coming-of-age play
Brighton Beach Memoirs.
“I’ve never had a real job-job,” he says. “I babysat. I worked for a caterer for one day.”
To this day, Parker can cite where
she was when she saw all her future husband’s movies: She was filming Footloose when she watched his starring turn in War
Games in 1983. A few years later, she and her actress friend Martha Plimpton caught his signature role as the smooth-talking teen in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at a theater in New York City. “It’s not like I had my sights set on him, but I was aware of him as an actor because I liked his work so much,” she says. Broderick recalls seeing her in 1991 as Steve Martin’s flighty love interest in the comedy L.A. Story: “I remember thinking she was wonderful, hilarious and beautiful.”
In the early ’90s, Broderick was directing a play for a theater company founded by two of Parker’s brothers. One of them made the introduction, and Broderick soon called Parker and left a message on her answering machine (!) to ask for a date. In 1996, the pair, now living together, appeared in a revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Broderick’s sister, an Episcopal priest, officiated their wedding ceremony in 1997.
They were still newlyweds when Parker began her six-year run as super-stylish writer Carrie
Bradshaw on Sex and the City.
It’s the HBO series that made Manolo Blahnik stilettos and cosmopolitan cocktails part of the pop culture vernacular and, on a personal level, allowed Parker (also a co-producer) to achieve freedom in the city she loves most. “If I hadn’t played that part, then I wouldn’t be doing this play,” she says. “I’ve had so many opportunities and