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Articles
Q &A
with Sarah Jessica Parker
E!
online
The Sex queen on peeping
paparazzi, the F-word and her gosh-darn no-nudity policy
by Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith | June 6, 2000
Sarah
Jessica Parker has come a long, long way from her Square
Pegs days. Now infinitely more hip than square, the sexy
fashionista is hard to imagine as the awkward, bespectacled
misfit of an '80s sitcom--or worse, the goofy sidekick in '80s
bebop flicks like Footloose and Girls Just Want to Have Fun.
What a difference a few decades make.
This summer, the curly maned
New Yorker is hotter than ever, as she gears up for the return
of her HBO smash hit, Sex and the City, and her gig hosting
the MTV Music Awards June 8.
Despite her cosmo-swilling,
chain-smoking character on Sex and her MTV commercials
requesting "nipple clips and G-strings" at the
awards show, Parker remains surprisingly down-to-earth,
modest--even a tad prudish. She stands by her rule of no nude
scenes and limits the use of four-letter words in the SATC
scripts.
Though in some ways she
relates to the cynical hipster she portrays in the HBO series,
Parker stresses that her life is much different. Like, even if
she weren't happily married to Matthew
Broderick, she would never cruise for men in graveyards.
And that's just for starters...
Do you
use the F-word in real life?
I don't use it, no.
You're
a nonswearer?
I use the S-word.
Shit?
Yes. In fact, I hesitate to tell you, but I think when I was
stunned to hear I had won the Golden Globe, the first words
out of my mouth--strangely enough for someone who doesn't use
foul language--may have been, "Oh, shit."
I was so shocked, and I could
not believe what had happened. I just lost all sense and then
said that. It's just so odd, because I don't tend to use
unladylike language.
You
came into the show with a rule that you wouldn't do any
nudity. Are you going to loosen that this season?
No, I've never done nudity in my whole career. I certainly
don't think now is the time to start. I don't think it's
necessary for anything I've done, although I have absolutely
no opinions against anyone who feels comfortable doing it.
You've
said you don't relate to the women in Sex and the City. Why is
that?
When I was single, my life was very different. It wasn't
nearly as colorful, and it certainly wasn't as busy. I think
my character [Carrie] has had a long career of dating. I
didn't have that. I was in relationships for a long time, and
that was it.
It was a very different way
of socializing. Though I know a lot of those people, and I see
it, and I live in a city that is social, it's never something
I did.
Your
single life wasn't colorful? What about dating JFK Jr.,
Nicolas Cage and Robert Downey Jr.?
I guess it was from the outside, but I think when I was dating
any of those people, it wasn't public, really. I've never been
someone who attends a lot of parties, goes to a lot of
premieres--an extrovert of sorts. So, although they were
public people, there are obviously different degrees of being
public people, some by choice and some by birth.
They were more quiet
relationships than they might appear. I think with any of
those men I had the great pleasure of keeping company with,
their desire also was for everything in their private life to
be private, and I respected that.
Is that
why you and Matthew had a secret wedding ceremony?
Yeah, we really didn't want it to be about strangers. We both
come from pretty large families and we wanted our wedding to
be for them. It just didn't feel appropriate to invite a
photographer or any press to something that meant so much to
us.
Do you
think you would have been swamped by media and paparazzi if
they had known?
Well, they did find out. It was a pretty raucous weekend prior
to our wedding. Matthew and I had to move out of our house. We
had to spend the night at a friend's house.
There were people calling two
days prior. They were trailing Matthew's friends--his friends
who are civilians, not actors or people in the business at
all. My family was reached by phone 48 hours prior to the
wedding. And I got many, many phone calls from people with
British accents telling me congratulations.
There were people looking
through our garbage. When we went to dinner, Matthew met me
and said, "There are people in our garbage." So, it
was out. There had been speculation. We don't flatter
ourselves that we're that interesting; it must have been a
slow news week.
Are you
anxious to have children?
Not specifically, but I'm not uninterested, either. We just
have to figure out a time when both of us are at home at the
same time.
Do you
try to stagger work assignments? Is that even possible?
We do, theoretically. We try to do that. But when an
opportunity comes along that's very compelling, it's awfully
hard to say no just because that's the idea you have in your
mind. I try to be around, and I'm often able to go visit
Matthew on his sets, and he comes to visit me. It's not a
guarantee, but we do try.
Doing
the series wouldn't prevent you from getting pregnant, would
it?
Well, certainly there's no law that prevents it. But I
recognize it wouldn't be great if my character were pregnant.
And also, it's a fairly arduous and demanding schedule for me,
so it wouldn't be terribly desirable for me to be pregnant
while doing this filming.
But I don't rule anything
out; there's never a "right" time. It's not in our
immediate plans, so we'll just see what happens.
You
smoke on the show; do you smoke in real life?
I am not smoking now. I smoke fake cigarettes on the show.
They're called Honey Rose--they have no nicotine. They smell
funny. They're made of lettuce or something.
How
long has it been since you quit smoking cigarettes?
A few months.
Is it
Nicorette time?
That's what Matthew used! He loved it. He was afraid he was
going to get addicted to the gum. It's hard. I chew gum all
the time. This year, I'm chewing gum on the show constantly. I
forget to take it out.
Is it
part of the plot?
I'm just a gum chewer anyway. But, yes it is, it's part of the
plot.
You
just renovated a town house.
We moved in about a year ago, so it's been great.
So, you
want to stay on the East Coast?
Oh, yes. We'll never leave. We come to Los Angeles a lot for
work, and my two best girlfriends live out there, but our
families are here and the theater is here--so I think we'll
always live here.
Do you
and Matthew have any plans to work together?
Nothing imminent, no. Not anything I can think of. But I
always hope I'll get to work with him again, because he's
really good.
What's
he doing now?
He's in a new play on Broadway called Taller than a Dwarf.
Are you
happy or sad Sex and the City shoots 18 episodes, as opposed
to 22?
It makes me very happy. Working for HBO is very unusual in
many good ways, and one of them is that there are no
advertisers to answer to. Every year we have a conversation
between me and the two executives who cover our show, and we
just decide how many we're going to do. It's a mutual decision
we make, and it's as many as we feel we can do well.
I like to think of the show
as this little event that happens every year, and the minute
we get past 18 episodes, it seems terrifying and undoable.
[That's] mostly because we film on location in the city of New
York, and it's 16 hours a day, and it's just a lot of work. We
want to do it really, really well, not in a mediocre fashion.
It's six months of hard labor--but it's not manual, so it's
all right. I love my job.
Anything
in the works besides the show and the MTV Movie Awards?
We shoot Sex till mid August, and then I think I'm going to do
a movie over my big hiatus--but I don't know which one yet. I
don't know what I'm going to be doing. They just put me in a
van in the morning and tell me where to go.
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