Sarah Jessica Parker Was 'Too Shy' to Strip Down for 'Sex and the City': 'Never Felt Comfortable Exposing Myself'
"I never had any judgements about anybody else doing it, it wasn’t like a morality thing … I was shy," Parker admitted of being nude on camera
Sarah Jessica Parker did quite a lot on Sex and the City — but going nude was not one of them.
During an appearance on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show on Thursday, the 58-year-old actress revealed that she initially had reservations about signing onto the HBO series due to fears she would have to bare it all on camera.
“I thought the script was really interesting, and really exciting, and different, and fresh, and I’d never seen anything like that,” Parker explained. “The only thing I said to him that I was concerned about was that I just didn’t feel comfortable doing nudity, and I suspected that if it wasn’t in the pilot, it would be a part of a series.”
According to the actress, show creator Darren Star soothed some of her anxieties when it came to getting naked. She recalled, “He said, ‘Don’t do it then … we’ll have other actors, if they feel comfortable doing it they’ll do it, but you do not have to.’”
“I think I just never felt comfortable exposing myself that way,” Parker confessed. “I never had any judgements about anybody else doing it, it wasn’t like a morality thing … I was shy.”
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Sarah Jessica Parker attends the 'And Just Like That' 25th anniversary eventKnowing that she was on a network that allowed raunchier language and subject matter, the And Just Like That star noted that she wanted to be intentional with how they used their lack of censorship.
“We were on HBO, and I knew that meant we could say anything we wanted, and we could be loose, and liberal, and salty, and ribald,” she explained. “But I also thought therefore it meant we had to be disciplined, and we shouldn’t just use language because we could.”
She added that she wanted to reflect her character’s true personality. “And Carrie Bradshaw’s a writer, and she’s really, really, really thoughtful about what she says, how she says it, when she says it, who’s she saying it to, and if we want to use language, let’s be really thoughtful about when she uses it, we can be smart about it," she explained.
Though Parker may have been shy about going nude in Sex and the City, her costar Cynthia Nixon shared that she had no problem showing some skin in the show’s revival series And Just Like That.
In the premiere episode of the SATC revival, the 57-year-old actress goes topless in a pool and later ups the ante when she tries on a strap-on she claims isn’t “a beginner model” before joking about her oral sex skills.
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"I feel like I was always fairly game for it," Nixon told Entertainment Tonight of going nude. "It's just one of the main subjects of the show is sex — people having sex and people having great sex and people having terrible sex and people having hilarious sex."
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