SATC Stars Shared Their IRL Insecurities In A Season 1 Scene

Kristin Davis continues to pull back the curtain on Sex and the City. The latest installment of her new podcast, Are You a Charlotte?, dropped on Jan. 26, and she shared behind-the-scenes stories from Season 1’s “Models and Mortals.” It turns out the episode marked “the one and only time” she and her SATC co-stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, and Cynthia Nixon were allowed to improvise.

An Unscripted Moment

As Davis reminded listeners, the second-ever episode of the series saw Carrie (Parker), Charlotte (Davis), Samantha (Cattrall), and Miranda (Nixon) scrutinize models and the men who date them. The subject made them confront some of their insecurities, which led the women to open up to each other over Chinese food. But first, the actors discovered they had some ad-libbing to do — for what Davis called “the sweetest reason.”

“We were each supposed to say what we felt insecure about, and the writers didn’t want to write that on paper,” she recalled. “So that was very sweet of them not to want to write what they thought that we would feel self-conscious about, to let us ad-lib what we felt self-conscious about.”

For Davis, it was her thighs. Nixon chose her chin, and Parker pointed to her nose. Cattrall’s Samantha, however, didn’t have a complaint. “I happen to love the way I look!” she said in the scene.

Improvising lines was not the norm on the SATC set. “It is the one and only time that we were told that we could ad-lib,” Davis noted. “After that, it never happened again. It was very, very, very frowned upon after this.”

Male Vs. Female Gaze

One part that Davis did not remember was the uncomfortable storyline featuring Carrie’s “modelizer” friend Barkley (played by Gabriel Macht). During the episode, Carrie learns that he secretly films his intimate encounters with models without their knowledge or consent. Davis pointed out how “whacked” that is.

“It is crazy,” she said. “But I do also feel like, you know, we’ve come a long way in some of these areas.”

Davis reflected on the show’s trajectory over its original six-season run, saying, “We became more grounded in the fact that we were about investigating things from the female perspective and not from the male gaze.”

The actor shared similar sentiments with People when she launched the podcast. “We’re definitely at a different place culturally, in terms of how we think about relationships and talk about relationships and sex,” she said. “But I feel like a lot of the things that the show brought up originally, which were so kind of scandalous and shocking at the time now are very commonly discussed. And so I love that kind of evolution and I love being able to use the show as a jumping off point into those discussions.”