Why Sarah Jessica Parker Was Terrified When HBO Picked Up Her TV Show

It's hard to imagine a world where Sarah Jessica Parker didn't become an international superstar thanks to her leading role as Carrie Bradshaw on Darren Star's landmark HBO series "Sex and the City." Imagine it, though, because as Parker recently revealed, she did not want to do a TV show, and she actually tried to get out of the project entirely.

In a conversation with her "Sex and the City" and "And Just Like That" co-star Kristin Davis — who plays Charlotte York-Goldenblatt on both the original show and the HBO Max reboot — on her podcast "Are You a Charlotte?" (via Entertainment Weekly), Parker revealed that she filmed the "Sex and the City" pilot and then sort of forgot about it ... until a producer approached her in New York City praising the pilot. Upon realizing other people had seen it, Parker still thought little of it until the show was officially announced. "I panicked," she told Davis. "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.'"

"I think that it was the idea of doing the same thing over and over and over again," Parker continued, noting her previous experience on shows like "Square Pegs." As she put it, she didn't want to be pigeon-holed:

"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. 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.'"

Ultimately, Parker was also afraid that she wouldn't have time to pursue other projects — "So the idea of a television series meant that I couldn't do all those things" — although she did allow that many TV actors do a lot of other work when their shows are on hiatus. Still, she was still totally freaked out over the idea of playing Carrie Bradshaw for a long time, which is really ironic, considering everything that's happened since.

As Sarah Jessica Parker then revealed to Kristin Davis, she actually begged her agent to get her off the project. She says she asked her agent, 'Can you get me out of this?' with a caveat that she would do absolutely anything else the premium network wanted to make that happen. "I said, 'I will give my services to HBO to fulfill my contract. So, any movies, I'll do for X number of years."

Thankfully for fans of "Sex and the City," Parker's (unnamed) agent convinced her to give it a shot. "He said, 'It can be wonderful. It can be great,'" Parker revealed before saying that the premium network's chairman at the time also weighed in. "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 recalled.

"It went from being this kind of oppressive idea to this one with endless possibilities," Parker continued before recalling her apparently lovely first day at work. "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 onto 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." Frankly, "never looked back" is an understatement; as even casual fans know, Parker has been playing Carrie Bradshaw for decades at this point.

Okay, so here's the full timeline of Sarah Jessica's time playing Carrie Bradshaw, which, to this day, is still a thing she's doing. "Sex and the City" officially concluded its run in 2004 (after starting in 1998), and in 2008, the first movie in the fledgling "Sex and the City" franchise, bearing the same title, hit theaters and performed admirably at the box office. "Sex and the City 2" arrived in 2010 and provided diminishing returns critically (perhaps it wasn't the best idea to randomly strand Carrie, Charlotte, and their gal pals in Abu Dhabi for no apparent reason and rely on cheap stereotypes and gags from that point on), though it also made money at the box office. A third film was ultimately scrapped, though that might have more to do with the long-simmering feud between Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall, the latter of whom played sex-positive PR maven Samantha Jones on the original series.

Then, in 2021, we got "And Just Like That," the official reboot of "Sex and the City" which brings Parker's Carrie, Davis' Charlotte, and Cynthia Nixon's Miranda Hobbes back into the fold without Samantha (Cattrall declined to participate apart from a single season 2 cameo that was filmed offsite and probably earned her a bathtub full of cash). The third season of "And Just Like That" arrives on HBO Max soon, and, obviously, Carrie will be back for another round of Cosmopolitans and gossip ... making it frankly a little ironic that, back in the '90s, she was trying to avoid this project in the first place.

"And Just Like That" premieres its third season on May 29, 2025 on HBO Max; you can watch the rest of the reboot there as well. As for "Sex and the City," the original series is streaming on both HBO Max and Netflix.