Sex and the City is one of the most impressive HBO shows of all time, and as quiet as it’s kept, Sarah Jessica Parker’s performance as Carrie Bradshaw has influenced millions and inspired at least half a dozen other shows. But its long-running nature invited one aspect of celebrity that no public figure can truly escape — scrutiny of physical appearance.
The show has spawned two films, a public feud, and two spin-offs, so by any metric, it’s a Hollywood success story. But when Sarah Jessica Parker sat down for the Call Her Daddy podcast, she shared that her success didn’t come without personal cost. Over the years, the various iterations of Carrie Bradshaw — her choices and depictions — have been endlessly scrutinized. Should she have gone with Mr. Big? Or whoever else? And some of that ire inevitably spilled over onto Sarah Jessica Parker herself.
A major theme of the show was how women’s appearances while aging have often been fodder for public debate. There’s a Season 5 episode, for instance, where during Carrie’s book launch, Samantha undergoes a very aggressive skincare procedure and people jump in shock whenever they see her face. While that may have seemed like a fun little arc in the show, Sarah Jessica now shares that the situation wasn’t all that different in real life.
The Booker Prize judge was on the podcast to promote the ongoing season of And Just Like That, and she recalled how promoting the show once involved reading reviews — not of the latest season, but of how she currently looked. Parker shared that comments about her appearance were the hardest part of her job, and how she often felt pressured to undergo cosmetic surgery. Yahoo! reports Sarah Jessica Parker saying, “Discussion of my physical appearance was the hardest. Like, stuff that I couldn’t change and wouldn’t change and had never considered changing, or still even after hearing something that was like, ‘What? Somebody would say that?’ — even still, no interest in changing it.”
She said the cruelty felt so “purposeful” and that she even called two of her friends “sobbing” over it. She told the host that, at the time, it felt like an entire season of that sort of commentary but she has since gotten over it, and that was really the last time she ever cried about criticism. Whether the critique was valid is a whole other story. It’s also quite fascinating because it suggests that culture at the time completely misread the text of the show, which was always about how women adapt to middle age in an era where careers matter just as much as personal lives.
It certainly didn’t help that when the second movie came out — which, by all intents and purposes, is still a bad movie — Ricky Gervais took to the often bizarre Golden Globes stage to harp on how Facetuned the stars’ faces must’ve been on the posters.
Ultimately, Sarah Jessica Parker is right here. The delight people took in pointing to her aging as a bug rather than a feature of what made the show so great was deeply misguided. And honestly — we all age. If we’re lucky.
