How Sarah Jessica Parker Almost Ran Away from "Sex and the City"

Take a moment to imagine: "Sex and the City" without Carrie Bradshaw, and New York without columns about men and Manolo Blahnik shoes. A kind of parallel Manhattan, where the girls are left only with Cosmopolitans, but no Sarah Jessica Parker. Sounds like a script for a dramatic spin-off: "And That’s When We Lost Carrie."

On the podcast "Are You a Charlotte?" Kristin Davis, the eternal romantic Charlotte herself, invited her friend and colleague Parker. On air, the actress admitted: after filming the pilot in 1997, she... forgot about the project. So much so that when she ran into a familiar producer, she didn’t even think about the future of the series. When HBO finally decided to launch the show, Parker, by her own account, panicked: "I’m not made for this! I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again."

Parker had already "done TV" before — but the flickering screen in those years seemed less like a stairway to heaven, and more like an escalator to depression. "I always dreamed of being a wandering actress: the series is over, I’d take a play, then a movie or even a movie of the week. And no routine!"

But her agents and HBO were more persistent: "It’ll be great," they assured her, "and if you don’t like it, you can quit after a year." At that moment, Parker recalls, she looked at the situation more broadly and decided to take the risk — especially since the first filming location was right under her nose: "I literally walked to the set. And then I never looked back."

As a result, the series ran for six seasons, earned Parker two Emmy awards, and launched a new TV genre: "girls in the city with philosophy and a cocktail glass." And New York gained another heroine — one it’s much easier to meet in your imagination than in Manhattan itself.

The moral of the story? Sometimes it’s worth taking a risk and popping out for bread — who knows, you might just end up in an HBO legend.