Sex, death and getting in touch with darkness
Actress will forever be known for her role as a tough attorney on Sex and the City, but dying has been a theme of some of her other roles
“When you were doing that show, you knew you had fallen into a pot of honey.” CYNTHIA NIXON ON SEX AND THE CITY
You may think of Cynthia Nixon as that having-it-all valkyrie of the legal profession, Miranda Hobbes, from Sex and the City, but there’s so much more to her than that.
For a quick lesson in just how versatile this Emmy-, Tony- and Grammy-winning actress can be, catch her work in an indie film called James White that opens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Nov. 27. The buzz from various film festivals is already hinting that Nixon ought to start making room for an Oscar in her trophy case.
She plays Gail White, a divorced woman with a 20-something son whose behaviour practically defines “irresponsible.” She survived one bout of cancer, but now it’s returned and the movie shows her journey toward death.
It’s not the first time Nixon’s been down this road. She won a Tony Award in 2012 (her second) for playing a woman dying of cancer in Wit; she scored her other Tony Award in 2006 as the mother who loses a child in Rabbit Hole.
When asked about the challenges of getting in touch with such darkness, she gives the tiniest of sighs and says, “It’s always a big challenge conjuring emotion, but especially on film. Onstage, you have a lengthy rehearsal period, the trajectory of the play itself and the energy of the audience to get you there.
“I started acting when I was 12 and I used to try to push myself up, try to generate emotion and then hold onto it.” She clenches her fists tightly, then opens them in a freeing motion.
“But I eventually learned that emotion is like water. You try and grab it and it slips through your fingers. If you just let it bubble up and flow freely, you’ve got a much better chance.”
She looks out the window at the bustling Toronto street beyond and says, “I’ll tell you what broke me up. At a certain point in your life when you’re old or sick or both, you turn to your grownup-ish child and say, ‘I need you to help me, because I can’t do it myself. I’m sorry to make these demands, but I need you now.’ ”
Nixon’s own mother died of cancer the same year she filmed James White, but “it was a totally different experience and it helped me more than hurt me.”
“My mother died at 82. She had three bouts of cancer, the first when she was 49 — the age I am now — but she survived the first two.
“And the last time, once we literally understood that she was dying, it was only three days. Don’t get me wrong, we fought and fought and fought as long as we thought it was manageable but then, suddenly, it was in her lungs, so they pulled her off all the machines and that was it.”
Nixon suddenly radiates the total control that made Miranda so attractive yet so scary on Sex and the City, so it seems the right moment to ask for her memories of that wildly successful TV series, which was spun off after six seasons into two feature films.
“When you were doing that show, you knew you had fallen into a pot of honey. You were shooting a show in New York City and it wasn’t a cop show? Check. It had four fascinating female characters? Double check. And costumes and locations that were never less than amazing? Jackpot.”
Every one of the show’s four stars had a different following and Nixon proudly declares hers was made up of “the workaholics, the feminists, the neurotics, the alpha types, they all gravitated to me, whether they were women or gay men. And the straight men would come up to me and say, ‘Every girl I ever dated was just like you.’ ”
She also shares what she thinks was a major secret of the show’s success: “As fantastical and unrealistic as some of the stuff that happened on the show seemed, everything in the script had to have either happened to one of the writers or to a person they were close to.”
The conversation shifts back to James White. Her character, Gail, thought she had survived cancer, but it returns and kills her.
Nixon herself survived a bout of breast cancer in 2006. Does she ever wonder if she’ll share Gail’s fate?
“I’m not saying I’m not scared of cancer,” she says calmly. “I’m as scared as the next person. But I’ve lived with cancer for years, first with my mother, then myself. That makes a difference. The devil you know may still be the devil, but you don’t necessarily think he’s the apocalypse.
“You know, if you stood up in a room and announced that you had been married for 33 years, or had the same job for 33 years, people would cheer. Well, my mother survived cancer for 33 years. I think that’s worth cheering too.”