At this point, there’s hardly anyone, Call Her Daddy creator Alex Cooper couldn’t have sitting right in front of her, pouring their hearts out. And for the June 18 episode, it was none other than it-girl across decades, Sarah Jessica Parker, our reel-life (and real-life) Carrie Bradshaw.
Now the hate against Carrie’s choices, decisions, reactions and (occasional) moral blindness, hasn’t been lost on audiences who’ve been glued to the screens for both the Sex and the City era and now the And Just Like That dilemma. But, Sarah says enough is enough. And with good reason.
“There’s a sentiment sometimes that she’s frustrating, or that she’s selfish, or she makes poor decisions, or she doesn’t manage her money. Well, yeah – all of that has been true over the course of the last 25 years”, she told Alex, adding, “there wouldn’t be a show if she was consistently a stellar human being”.
Adding a very obvious gendered perspective to her take, Sarah added, “We forgive our male leads. We have no problem if they’re murderers. My favourite show in that period was The Sopranos, and I love Tony Soprano – but he was a deeply flawed man.
We didn’t talk as much about that as we did with Carrie having an affair with a married man. It was very curious to me when they would say she’s selfish, and I can give you ten reasons and ways in which she wasn’t”.
Despite Carrie being “so condemned”, Sarah asserted there’s a lot to love about Carrie. “I think, fundamentally, Carrie is an extraordinarily decent and good person — an extremely devoted friend, she’s generous of spirit and time, in all she has to offer”, she reflected.
And as for the hate, she doesn’t let it scorch her skin anymore. After all, at least there’s something Carrie makes the audience feel: “But I ultimately think that all those feelings are pretty fantastic. That kind of connection and those kinds of strong feelings, both positive and negative, are pretty wonderful. People are kind of captive in those moments to something, and I think that’s perfectly fine. I just think, it’s just interesting, the ways in which we judge women, and not men”.
Sarah even shared how Carrie’s outrageously self-serving choices — always with a side of conscience reckoning in the aftermath —was a deliberate choice on the part of showrunner Michael Patrick King. The backlash and judgement didn’t make Carrie softer, it made her more ‘her’. Complicated. And that’s as real as it gets.
