It’s a hot, stuffy day in Paris’s Champs-Élysées district. Guys on mopeds are whizzing around the backstreets like dragonflies. Couples are sharing midday cigarettes and thick espressos across metal tables outside Le Café de Paris. Everything is busy, rambunctious, fizzing with energy. And if you were to walk into one of the city’s most famous hotels, up the red carpeted floor and into one of its many rooms and alcoves, you’d find Sarah Jessica Parker—of And Just Like That… and Sex and the City fame—in a funereal lace gown, perfectly waved hair, and scarlet peep-toe heels, mascaraed eyes blinking expectantly.
Press junkets are never easy—actors are often sat on stools in windowless rooms beneath glaring lights for hours at a time, usually jet-lagged and disorientated while people wearing headphones march in and out with clipboards. But Parker is, obviously, a seasoned pro. Candid and sincere in person—there are fewer of the wry one-liners we’ve come to expect of Carrie Bradshaw, and even the way she sits is different—the 60-year-old actress greets me as if we’re at a dinner table. “Would you like some water?” she asks, “Are you going to get thirsty?” She regularly turns the line of questioning back around, pushing against the usual set-up. “Do your friends turn their phone off at a dinner table?” she asks, at one point. And later, “Do you share your closet with a partner?” In other words: she’s friendly, she’s curious.
Parker herself needs no introduction. Though the actress has appeared in a number of films over the past few decades, it’s her role as Carrie Bradshaw that she remains most synonymous with. Most women, and some men, who are currently alive were raised on Sex and the City’s six seasons—regardless of their generation—with Bradshaw’s sardonic and sometimes neurotic narration so deeply familiar that it’s hard to imagine a world in which she wasn’t embedded within the collective psyche (“And I couldn’t help but wonder…”). Now, many of those same fans have transferred their attention to And Just Like That…, its similar if slightly more absurd and soapy sequel spin-off, which thankfully contains just as many prime fashion moments and timely conversation starters.
And so, with And Just Like That… Season 3 on our screens until mid-August, we caught up with Parker to chat favorite fashion moments, generational divides, and why nobody should achieve “massive success” at 22 years old.
Vogue: Do you have any favorite spots in Paris?
Sarah Jessica Parker: Oh my gosh, I love the Picasso museum. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been there. If you’re looking at the museum, there’s a restaurant to the left—that’s my favorite. I like walking around, I love the Musée d Orsay.
Do you have a favorite fashion moment from And Just Like That…?
I don’t—there’s too much that I love. Everyone works so hard together to get it right—Molly [Rodgers] and Daniel [Santiago] in particular. They came to London because I was working there, so we started all the fittings there. They had been there for a couple of days prior and had been pulling from these incredible places, some of which are vintage stores and places called “honey pots” that nobody knows about; pulling from people’s attics and trunks and basements. A lot of what they pulled—I’d say 60% of that first fitting—was from London, and I wore almost all of the London [pieces].
I love the first dress you wear, the Simone Rocha. Also that completely insane gingham hat.
That’s a milliner from Berlin [Maryam Keyhani] with that Ossie Clark vintage dress.
Would you wear that hat strolling in the park?
Not strolling in the park, no. But that’s yet again another example of how radically different we actually are. I’d wear the dress and the Dr. Scholl’s, but I’d probably have a less easy time rationalizing that hat in the middle of the day. But if you put me in a room with tables and tables of hats, I’m going to keep grabbing them. It’s going to be very hard to get those hats out of my hands.
So your style is different to Carrie. How else are you “radically different”?
I’ve been with my husband for 33 years—I’ve got kids. My single life was far less colorful. I didn’t go to clubs, I didn’t drink, I didn’t spend my money in the same way she spends money, I was much more frugal, much more thoughtful about a savings account and what it meant. I’ve been working since I was eight years old as a professional. We dress differently, we approach love differently, we have different times with friends. She has much more leisure time than I’ve ever had. But that’s what makes it so interesting. The stories are always compelling. It’s always unfamiliar. But it’s still a person [with] which I’m intimately familiar.
You must also be incredibly familiar with Miranda, Charlotte, and Aidan, as fictional characters. Do they feel like real old friends?
The people playing them are, and do. I’d be curious to talk to another person who’s done this—but there aren’t many who have. [But I’d like to ask], “Where do they fit into your life when they aren’t on set?” Because, for me, there is some compartmentalizing. I am a mother, a wife, and a friend, and I have other jobs—I don’t think about it when I’m not doing it. But I live in a city and people are always approaching me on the street and wanting to talk about their feelings about Carrie and the other characters; good and bad decisions she made, we made. [It happens] on the subway, hailing a cab… wherever I am. So it’s not that she’s gone, but she doesn’t consume my time when I’m not shooting the show.
That makes a lot of sense. I’ve always wondered if that was the case.
Perhaps it’s like… if you’re writing. Before the piece, the article, the book is finished, you’re thinking about it. I’m always thinking, I’ve got to learn lines, I’ve got to feed the kids, then I’ve got to learn lines. Until you turn that in, it’s there, it’s present. But the minute you’re done with that article, it’s gone—I’m assuming. And I imagine for an author of a book, right? But it’s the same for me.
Would you ever write a fiction book, like Carrie?
No, I don’t have any of those skills. I can’t write. I can write letters, email, I can write speeches for presentations. I don’t have the discipline. I didn’t go to college, I don’t know how to write a paper properly. My children do. It’s a real point of pride.
How do you think Carrie’s changed as a person from Sex and the City to And Just Like That…? This is someone who was in their 30s and now they’re in their 50s. I think she seems more chill.
[Nods.] Aren’t you different to how you were 10 years ago? You’re more equipped to deal with the things that are harder to deal with. You know more, you’ve had more experiences. You’ve hurt somebody, they’ve hurt you, you’ve disappointed somebody, they’ve disappointed you. You fell short at work, you were great, you got fired, you got hired, you’re just better at life. It’s interesting that people are like, “She’s so much more mature…”
Do other people say this to you?
Oh, all day. And I’m like, of course she is! Season 1, her husband passed away and I think she dealt with it so freaking well. There’s so much nobility attached to grief; I thought she was generous about it, she wasn’t narcissistic. And then you’re recovering, you’re resurfacing. She’s reaching out again, she’s seeing what exists in the world for her. So all that stuff informs you—I hope.
So it’s not surprising to me that she’s “more chill,” as you put it, more philosophical… not hysterical. When there’s a revelation that Aidan shares with her, 20 years ago she would have marched off and talked to her friends like, “I should leave him and that’s not what we understood and that’s not the arrangement!” This time she was like, “Well, what do you think? Because this is what I was thinking.” It’s not drama or unnecessary hysteria.
I’m the same age as Carrie was in the first season of SATC and I’m semi doing her job, although our lives are very different. Do you have any advice on how to be more Carrie?
I feel like you don’t need it. You don’t need my advice. Look at you. What do you feel is absent in your life? Where is the deficit?
Well, apart from the walk-in wardrobe…
Keep in mind that was Perry Street, that was that little apartment. And that closet was big, but it wasn’t shiny. It was kinda nasty, in a good way, do you know what I mean? And filled with, initially, used stuff, vintage stuff. And by the way, you look like you’d have an amazing closet.
[Laughs.] Thank you. So, I don’t know if you watch TikTok, but–
I don’t have it on my phone, I’m overwhelmed by it. I’m barely on Instagram, even that’s fraught, and I want to be there more.
I wouldn’t go to TikTok, it’s too addictive.
Yeah, I’m afraid of that.
Actually, your eclipse video keeps coming up on my [For You] page at the moment. When you got so excited about the eclipse.
What… now?! Wasn’t that three or four years ago?
It was eight years ago.
Are you serious?! Stop it!
It still pops up on TikTok. People just love that video because you were so excited. My favorite line was when you said that there were “birds that are rarely ever seen.”
I was so excited. [Laughs.] But there were. There were [rare birds] where we were. We were in very shallow water, in the South, in the Carolinas. The birdlife during those three minutes was crazy, the birds were crazy. [The birds] were like, “Wait a second, nobody speak.” They were trying to just figure it out. So cool.
I’m seeing a lot of young people discovering Sex and the City right now—people in their early 20s getting really into it, even though it’s three decades old now. It still feels resonant.
I think it’s because it was made available on Netflix. So it’s as if it’s just launched—it’s like 1997 all over again. The differences I’m starting to hear—a little bit from friends who have daughters that age—is that what they’re objecting to is Carrie and Big’s relationship. It’s really interesting to me. It really reflects our generations and what we allowed in each other and who raised us. If I think about Carrie’s mother, and the women she saw in her life, how they behaved with men, with fathers, with bosses, and who raised Big, that man, that person who was most influential in his life… [They were] a generation that was, this is the man, this is the woman, sexual politics look like this, this is your job, this is her job. So the things that this new generation is finding fault with, or objecting to, is because they were raised by us. I’m talking about inter-personal relationships, not about larger systemic issues, you know? It’s interesting to me. I love talking about it.
Maybe people have always felt this way, but I feel like young people today feel like their life is over when they hit 30, but I think SATC is a reminder that it’s just beginning.
I hope no one thinks their life is over at 30. But I know that, I hear it all the time. I hear it from young kids all the time, “I’m too old, already at 22, to make an impact.” And I’m like… please don’t. Don’t be a massive success at 22, be a success at 34, 37, 42. I think Instagram has created a world that is so rarified and has convinced everybody that they’re supposed to be driving really expensive cars and wearing really expensive watches, and everybody’s supposed to know who you are for your life to have meaning. I feel like it’s heartbreaking, because it doesn’t allow for any exploration.
Do you think it’s okay to wear heels inside the house when someone lives downstairs?
We don’t wear shoes in our house, let’s start with that. So I’m not wearing heels. I can imagine someone living under those heels and having really strong objections to it, can’t you? No rugs! We have an upstairs neighbor, and we can hear her, but the weird thing is, I kind of like it? But I think it’s very hard to argue wearing those… click, click, click. Good luck in front of the judge, with that one.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.