“Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell tells Page Six that she thinks its recently announced reboot will work just fine without Kim Cattrall — in spite of the widespread doubts of its fans.
Cattrall co-starred on all six seasons of the original HBO smash hit TV show, and both its movie adaptations.
But — amid an ugly public feud with co-star Sarah Jessica Parker — she’s said she won’t take part in the upcoming HBO Max revamp, which was officially announced on Sunday. Page Six first reported in December that the show was in the works.
Critics and fans have fretted that the show won’t click without Cattrall’s loveably louche character Samantha. A typical social media reaction came from a Twitter user going by Rebeckah Hird, who wrote, “‘Sex and the City’ doing a new series without Samantha is like Destiny’s Child making a comeback without Beyoncé.”
But Bushnell, who wrote the 1994 novel upon which the show was based, tells us that the angst is unwarranted.
“You know what, I think it’s fine. Kim is a grown woman. She is 64 and she’s made a decision that I’m sure she has 10 very good reasons for and I respect her for that,” she told us, “I also think it will be interesting. But I also know there’s a lot of interesting characters like [Cynthia Nixon’s] Miranda. We are all Mirandas. Miranda is an interesting character — but I don’t know what they’re gonna do.”
“Kim should be happy — and I think she is happy. I think that her character Samantha is always going to be an inspiration to them,” she added. “So somehow, I imagine she’ll be there in spirit and as an inspiration that gives them a chance of exploring sexuality with different characters [without Samantha hogging the libidinous spotlight].”
She also said that the reboot’s team of award-winning writers would come up with plenty of ideas to make up for Cattrall’s absence.
As far back as 2017, Cattrall has made it clear that she is no longer interested in working with Parker. When Piers Morgan asked her in an interview that year if she’d consider working on a planned third “Sex and the City” movie, she said that her decision to pass wasn’t about salary demands or contracts, but that, “this is really where I take to task the people from ‘Sex and the City’ and specifically Sarah Jessica Parker, in that I think she could have been nicer.”
When Parker offered her condolences to Cattrall back in 2018 after her brother, Chris, passed away, Cattrall responded by tweeting, “My Mom asked me today ‘When will that @sarahjessicaparker, that hypocrite, leave you alone?’ Your continuous reaching out is a painful reminder of how cruel you really were then and now. Let me make this VERY clear. (If I haven’t already) You are not my family. You are not my friend. So I’m writing to tell you one last time to stop exploiting our tragedy in order to restore your ‘nice girl’ persona.”
Parker, however, has been somewhat more concilliatory. When a fan wrote on Parker’s Instagram that they would miss “Kim/Samantha” in the reboot, Parker replied, “We will too. We loved her so.”
Bushnell is currently working on the TV adaptation of her novel, “Is There Still Sex in the City?”