The co-star Kim Cattrall called cruel: “You are not my family. You are not my friend”
Working together in close proximity for an extended period of time is no guarantee that colleagues will become friends, something Kim Cattrall made clear beyond any reasonable doubt when she continued distancing herself from one of her most noted TV co-stars.
Since beginning her acting career in 1975’s action thriller Rosebud alongside Peter O’Toole and Richard Attenborough, Cattrall had gone on to rack up a huge number of credits in a diverse array of film and television projects, which saw her pinball from genre to genre across screens big and small before she finally landed the part that would become known as her signature role.
Comedy hit Police Academy, John Carpenter’s cult classic Big Trouble in Little China, and sci-fi sequel Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country were joined by guest spots on TV shows including Starsky & Hutch, The Incredible Hulk, Columbo, and Charlie’s Angels to name but a small few, ensuring she was never short of work before landing the most prominent character of her professional life when she was hired as Sex and the City‘s Samantha Jones.
Through six seasons and 94 episodes, the series was one of the biggest and most talked-about shows on all of television, with Cattrall netting five Primetime Emmy nominations for ‘Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series’, and four Golden Globe nods for ‘Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film’, winning on the third attempt for Sex and the City‘s third season.
The fact the two feature-length spinoffs combined to earn over $700million at the box office indicated that being off-screen for a number of years had done nothing to dampen the enthusiasm fans still held for the series, but even after spending so long as acting as the best friend of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw in a fictional setting, Cattrall never saw her as anything more than co-workers in real life.
The actor admitted to Piers Morgan that “we’ve never been friends”, drawing a clear line between their on and off-camera existences. “We’ve been colleagues and in some ways it’s a very healthy place to be, because then you have a clear line between your professional life and relationship and your personal,” not that Parker felt entirely the same way.
In fact, she was left stunned by Cattrall’s revelations, which she found “really upsetting” to the point of “heartbreaking”. She repeatedly tried to mend fences, but when Parker attempted reaching out after a personal bereavement, the Sex and the City feud grew even deeper after Cattrall unloaded with both barrels.
Following the death of her brother in 2018, Parker offered condolences, only to be swiftly shut down by a social media post. “Your continuous reaching out is a painful reminder of how cruel you really were then and now. Let me make this VERY clear. (If I haven’t already),” Cattrall wrote. “You are not my family. You are not my friend. So I’m writing to tell you one last time to stop exploiting our tragedy in order to restore your ‘nice girl’ persona.”
Of course, because nobody in Hollywood can say no to a lucrative financial offer for too long, Cattrall made a guest appearance as Samantha in the season two finale of the sequel series And Just Like That, even if she didn’t share the same frame as any of her former six-season scene partners.
