Sarah Jessica Parker says she panicked when ‘Sex and the City’ was picked up by HBO

Sex and the City sans Sarah Jessica Parker?! Well, it almost happened!

On the latest episode of the Are You a Charlotte? podcast, host Kristin Davis welcomed none other than her SATC costar, who revealed that, yes, there actually was a moment when Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Samantha (Kim Cattrall), and Charlotte (Davis) could have been without SJP as their fearless fashionista friend Carrie Bradshaw.

Parker recalled that months after shooting the pilot in New York City back in 1997, she had essentially forgotten about the project until she was approached on the streets of the Big Apple by a well-known female producer, who told the actress that she had seen the pilot and thought it was “really good.” Parker said she didn’t think much of it and “went on with my day.”

Soon after, though, HBO picked up the show — much to Parker’s dismay. “I panicked,” she told Davis about learning that the cable network wanted to move forward with the series. “When the show was picked up, I was like, ‘I can’t be on a TV show! I don’t think I’m suited for that life.'”

While Parker acknowledged with fondness the fact that she had done TV before — including the shows Equal Justice, A Year in the Life, and the underrated early ’80s high school comedy Square Pegs — the experience “also kind of depressed me,” so she was reluctant to return to the small screen.

“I think that it was the idea of doing the same thing over and over and over again,” she clarified about her hesitation regarding SATC.

“I think I’d always been lucky that I got to be on a television series and then it was over. Like, I met great people, had a great experience, worked with great actors, great directors, thought the stories were interesting, wanted to do the shows, and they had shorter lives, maybe one or two seasons,” Parker said of her past TV projects. “And then I moved on and I would do a play or I’d do some readings, and then I’d do a part in a movie, and then I’d do, you know, a movie of the week. And I just kind of bounced around and I really thought, ‘That is the goal. The journeyman is the goal. You want to be moving.'”

She continued, “So the idea of a television series meant that I couldn’t do all those things,” before admitting that she was wrong for thinking that way because actors “can still do [other] things on their hiatuses.”

But, without the benefit of the hindsight she has now, Parker recalled anxiously asking her agent, ‘Can you get me out of this?’ and even offered to do anything else for HBO if it meant not having to commit to SATC. “I said, ‘I will give my services to HBO to fulfill my contract. So, any movies, I’ll do for X number of years.”

However, Parker noted that her agent tried to get her to view the series commitment a little differently. “He said, ‘It can be wonderful. It can be great.’ And the beauty of HBO [at the time] was that it was kind of an unknown species … and [former HBO chairman] Chris Albrecht said, ‘Do it for a year, and if you don’t want to do it anymore, we don’t do it,'” she shared.

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It was in that moment that Parker had a change of heart. “It went from being this kind of oppressive idea to this one with endless possibilities. And the first day we started shooting as a series, the location was up the street from my house. I remember thinking, ‘I can walk to work. I’m not driving on to a lot. I’m not getting on a freeway and hoping I get myself there.’ And I walked up to the location and I never looked back.”

Never looked back indeed. As a result, Sex and the City ran for six seasons, earned seven Emmy Awards, including two Best Actress wins for Parker, saw the release of two theatrical films, and spawned the revival series And Just Like That, which returns for its third season May 29 on Max.

You can hear Parker’s full conversation on Are You a Charlotte? below.