Cynthia Nixon trusts the “And Just Like That…” creative team to pull in the actresses’ real life experiences when crafting the series. While Nixon has directed three episodes and serves as an executive producer — as do co-stars Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis — she leaves the writing to the writers.
“The writers may choose to add elements of all of our experiences,” Nixon said in an interview with Variety. “Michael Patrick King obviously knows us very well, as do the other writers, particularly Elisa Zuritsky and Julie Rottenberg, who were there on the original show.”
Season 3 of the “Sex and the City” sequel series has Nixon’s Miranda getting back into the dating world, including a tryst with none other than Rosie O’Donnell. After having to ride emotional ups and downs, particularly in the show’s first season, Nixon said that “it was fun to take a breather.”
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“Our show, whether it’s the old show or the current show, is most quintessentially itself when people are having terrible dating experiences,” she explained. Nixon called Miranda’s third season stories a “throwback” to her “Sex and the City” days, just dating a different gender.
“When Miranda was dating back in the day, it often didn’t go well, but at least she was not out of practice. Now, she’s super out of practice. She’s dating an entirely different kind of person. And it’s a brave new world of sexual politics; on dating apps, everything is different. So it felt really fun. Miranda is so focused on her competence, so it’s always fun to plop her into a situation in which she is fairly incompetent,” Nixon related.
The actress is pulling double-duty on HBO Max currently, with not only new episodes of “And Just Like That…” airing through July 31, but a the third outing of “The Gilded Age” launching Sunday, June 22 (tonight!). The first episode of the season premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 12 (and IndieWire’s Ben Travers liked it).
Nixon, whose career also included a New York gubernatorial in 2018, told IndieWire in 2022 that she modeled her “Gilded Age” character Ada on her own grandmother, Violt Dennison.
“Denny was an enthusiastic person who had all sorts of interests, traveled everywhere, and knew how to fly a plane as a young woman,” she explained. She had men that she was in love with, but it never worked out. Denny would say, ‘As you age as an unattached woman, you become more and more invisible in gatherings.’ But she was a person who had an enormous interest in young people.”
