Sarah Jessica Parker on putting Carrie to rest with her new show
Sarah Jessica Parker is heading for a Divorce on screen
Sarah Jessica Parker is waiting for a menu at a restaurant in Hastingson-hudson, a Westchester County suburb of New York, when a 50-something man in a polo shirt and shorts shows up at her table. “I’m out of your face right after this little note I made for you – check it out,” he says. He hands her a small folded piece of paper and waits as Parker reads it. “Aw,” she says, and smiles. “Thank you! Thank you, Michael!”
On Sex and the City, Parker famously played Carrie Bradshaw, an every-single-woman, serially dating and hotly pursuing ideal love. Perhaps because of that, Michael took the opportunity to launch into tales of his own love life, half-flirting, half-unloading: the girlfriend who recently dumped him, the new girl who might really be something. “You’re cute as a button,” his note reads.
Despite Parker’s age (51), her 19 years of marriage to Matthew Broderick, and her three children, her public image remains closely bound up with that of Carrie, a symbol of youthful possibility, forever available, forever adorable.
This month, 12 years after the series went off the air, Parker is returning to HBO with a show whose very title – Divorce – suggests the bitter culmination of all that sex in the city. She plays Frances, a kind of anticarrie, someone long married, living (brace yourself ) in the suburbs, and working as a corporate recruiter, her arty dreams subsumed by financial necessity. Her husband – although not for much longer – is Robert (Thomas Haden Church), a real estate entrepreneur down on his luck. Frances is far from a starryeyed romantic: she has cheated on her husband; she is a narcissistic oversharer, a foul-mouthed accuser, a weak-kneed manipulator. She is also, as played by Parker, deeply real and somehow appealing.
“I’m still getting to know her,” Parker says. She is quick to clarify that she is no more Frances than she ever was Carrie (she and Broderick married about a week before she shot the pilot). But Divorce, at turns moody and comic, does cover material that is meaningful to Parker, who is an executive producer of the series. For some years, she has wanted to do a show about long-term relationships, a natural outgrowth, she says, of countless conversations she has had with friends who, like her, are in early middle age, a time when it’s common for people to grapple with the choices they have made, in relationships as much as anything else. The show reflects, she says, a “certain introspection and reckoning” that is inevitable after some 15 or 20 years of marriage.
“It’s a really specific point in a person’s life, right now, for my generation,” says Parker. “It’s when you start to think about relationships, the time spent, what came of it – and what do you do with where you find yourself now?”
After Sex and the City, Parker did not look very hard for her next big role; when people asked about another television series, “I used to say never,” she told Alec Baldwin on his podcast, Here’s the Thing. The schedule is demanding for someone raising three children (her twins, Marion and Tabitha, are now seven, and her son, James Wilkie, is 13), and she never found a show that intrigued her enough to make the family sacrifice worthwhile. “When you’re at a point in your life where you can make choices, you can make a choice to say no,” she says. “It’s kind of nice.”
She made two Sex and the City movies, to decidedly mixed reviews, and was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in The Family Stone. Following that, one of her movies had critical success but small audiences
(Smart People, 2008), while others had less favourable reviews and even smaller audiences (see Spinning Into
Butter, 2007). Her reputation as a beloved star never flagged but neither did she ever land on a role so strong that it put Carrie to bed for good. “It is hard to find material you really love, particularly when you’ve been so successful,” Broderick says. “It feels like a lot of pressure.”
Parker spent much of her energy in recent years leveraging her brand in the service of high culture (she is vice chairwoman of the New York City Ballet) and her own businesses – a fragrance line and the SJP shoe collection, which she introduced in 2014 and is carried by high-end department stores. All along, she developed television and film ideas as a producer, including, for some time, a show called Into the Fire, which
HBO passed on. It featured a talkshow host who quits her job, blows up her career and has an affair with the father of one of her children’s classmates.
In some of its details, Into the Fire sounds like Girlfriends’ Guide to
Divorce, which has been renewed for a third season on Bravo, one of a number of television shows in recent years that have featured women in their late 40s or early 50s reinventing their love lives: On Nashville, Rayna, played by Connie Britton, ends her marriage and enjoys a succession of suitors; on The Affair, Helen (Maura Tierney) is betrayed by her cheating husband but goes on to have flings of her own. “I want to save my life while I still care about it,” Frances tells Robert, trying to explain why she wants a divorce; it’s as if some sense of imminently fading possibility propels Frances into new romance.
HBO suggested that Parker meet with Sharon Horgan, the producer and co-star of Amazon’s
Catastrophe, who ultimately wrote the pilot of Divorce. The resulting project appealed to Parker both for its darkness and for its less-thanglamorous milieu. “So often when you see divorce in cinema or on television, it’s like – War of the Roses! Rich people fighting!” she says. “I wanted to tell a different story, one that I haven’t really seen on television.”
The bar was “quite high” for Parker’s return, says Richard Plepler, HBO’S chief executive, who felt this show reached that standard. “It’s not a Hollywoodisation of divorce,” he says, “but a very authentic one, something she could sink her teeth into creatively and artistically.” Both Plepler and Parker mentioned the influence of An Unmarried Woman, the 1978 Jill Clayburgh film that offered an unflinching look at how a flawed but charming wife handles being unexpectedly single after her husband walks out.
Parker was comfortable with embracing her character’s flaws, says Paul Simms, the showrunner of Divorce. “I was a little surprised and pleased that she was willing to not worry about being necessarily likeable,” he says. “Even though she ultimately is quite likeable.”
Although Parker speaks of the characters in Divorce as middle class, it might be more accurate to say they are upper middle class in appearance, middle class in disposable income; they look like a couple with fancy educations, now tenuously maintaining a gimcrack normalcy post-crash, with the help of revolving credit lines and some just-in-time turns of luck. If Mr Big, Carrie’s beloved, represented one ‘90s male icon, the finance type, Robert, with his debt and pickup truck, represents a very current countertype, a disempowered white guy baffled to find things are no longer going his way.
It only slowly dawned on Parker, she says, that HBO was expecting her to play the lead in whatever show she developed about marriage midlife. She might not have felt ready to take it on, she says, were it not for the experience she had in 2013 with The
Commons of Pensacola ,aplayby Amanda Peet that Parker starred in, alongside Blythe Danner. “Theatre demands a very specific kind of wonderful exhaustion,” says Parker, “which really reminded me of all I still wanted to do – and how much I missed the feeling of not getting it, of being lost and working in such a concentrated way. I really fell in love with acting again.”
In conversation, Parker has a big, rewarding laugh and a habit of turning the question on the interviewer. “I’m a very curious person,” she says. “When I was younger, my stepfather was always telling me to stop staring at people.” She is also a stylish writer, a talent that shows up in her emails, which are carefully crafted and sprinkled with fanciful touches. “Let me know our meeting place,” she wrote, after it was settled that we would head to Hastings-on-hudson, where Divorce is set, on a train leaving from Grand Central Terminal. “It’s romantic to meet at the clock.”
One morning, she arrives at the clock, perfectly prompt, dressed in Swedish-chic chunky sandals and an oatmealcoloured, 1970s-style sundress (“Vintage,” she says, “I probably paid $29 for it.”) As she walks through the terminal, she moves quickly, accustomed to people stopping in their tracks, stupefied, as they recognise her. When someone tries to approach her to talk, she has a warm but effective response at the ready: “I’m so sorry, I wish I could, thank you so much, I have to catch my train!” She offers a big smile, a girlish wave, direct eye contact, somehow meeting the energy of the fan with enthusiasm of her own. From a distance, to a tourist, she might have seemed a holographic conjuring, an icon of turn-of-millennium New York there to enhance the iconic New York setting.
For Parker, Grand Central Terminal evokes her ‘70s-era childhood, days when her own family of eight children – then not financially stable enough to call itself middle class – briefly lived in Dobbs Ferry, which neighbours Hastings-on-hudson. “My older brother and I would come in, alone, for auditions,” she says. That was when she was 12; at 13, she played Annie on Broadway. Soon after that, she became the beloved soul sister of C-list high school girls everywhere, playing the brainy, centre-parted, smartmouthed Patty on CBS’ short-lived
Square Pegs .“Forme, doing it was a priceless experience,” Parker, all of 18, said in an interview shortly after the series ended. “But television isn’t what I want. Theatre and film are.”
She could not have known then how much cultural currency television would come to have – or how big a role she herself would play in establishing its ascendancy. With that influence came celebrity and the kind of public scrutiny that stings, especially for a parent; paparazzi and tabloid reporters are often camped outside her family’s Lower Manhattan home. There have also long been tabloid rumours about the demise of her marriage, which might make the choice of a show called
Divorce seem revealing, as if it were some subconscious confirmation of her preoccupations.
That the public might think that, Parker says, suggests a misunderstanding of what really motivates her as an actor. “When people ask about the ways in which I relate to Frances, I usually say, ‘I look like her, but that’s it,’” she says. “It’s a funny thing to ask, because all you want to do as an actor is be someone else.” Why,” she adds, “would you ever want to play someone like you?”
Parker sounds genuinely bewildered by the persistence of tabloid interest in her marriage. “I guess it’s because we just... keep staying married,” she says. “Maybe that annoys them?” Broderick, she says, is “still the person I want to experience things with, I want to do new things with.” It may be a sign of the health of their current relationship that neither party
feels the need to portray it as any more perfect than most that have weathered three children, two big careers and nearly two decades.
Parker describes marriage as a series of choices – choosing to stay, choosing to find patience in it. “It’s saying, I’m going to try not to roll my eyes,” she says. “It’s thinking about the delight in something that’s delightful to him but that may or may not be to you.”
Asked what Parker might enjoy about playing Frances, Broderick thinks for a moment. “She gets to be pissed off at her husband, which I think would be fun for her,” he deadpans. But his protectiveness of Parker, as she prepared for her show’s debut, was evident. “I’m always nervous,” he says. “It’s like watching your child walk onto the playground. You want them to be treated well. And when they’re not, it’s horrible to watch.”
Parker seems to relish the gap between the show’s plot and her own reality, the way she can experience the aftershocks of a dissolution from a safe creative distance. “Frances was never single with children, never single with a mortgage – so I think all that’s going to be really interesting,” she says, already musing about a second season. “How much does she want to date? How much does she really want to take her clothes off with someone?”
Parker slaps her hand against her chest. “Can you imagine? I’d be like – no, we are just going to be companions. I’d be horrified!”
It would have been an easier path, in some ways, for Parker to skip all the exposure and time constraints that come with a new show, to ride out the duration of her career nurturing her
“I was pleased that Sarah was willing to not worry about being necessarily likeable”
brand (and businesses) in the safe, bright afterglow of Carrie. “What do you do after you’ve created one of the cultural landmarks of your time – how do you follow it up?” says actor John Benjamin Hickey, a close friend. “If she had stopped, I would have been like, yeah, I get it. But I think she has a hunger as an artist to challenge herself and to explore a kind of complicated darkness. Her interest in the subject matter isn’t tabloidy – it’s existential.”
Over lunch, Parker confesses that she is somewhat terrified about the show’s premiere, partly for fear that her fans might be expecting something the show is not – that they would judge it not by its own merits but by how closely it inspired the same giddy pleasures that her previous work has.
“This is not Carrie in the suburbs, Carrie the commuter,” she says. “And I kind of want to get ahead of that, so that there is not this giant heave of disappointment when people find the show is not ... that same buoyant kind of thing.”
Parker knows that she played Carrie for so long that many fans came to assume that the character simply was her – that there was no effort involved in inhabiting her so fully.
“But it was definitely acting,” she says. “I never lived any of those experiences in my own life. I’m not Carrie. Sometimes I feel that if I’ve done my job well with Divorce, it will be a reminder that, yes, she’s an actor. But maybe people will start to think I’m like Frances. And then I’ll have to explain how different Sarah and Frances are.” She brightens at the thought.