Sarah in the city

Catherine Gee discusses relationships, family and future plans while on her London lunch date with Sarah Jessica Parker

By Catherine Gee

Despite her face being synonymous around the world with the name Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker has been making films for 23 years. She started her first role in a major film in Footloose back in 1984 and has since been loved in Flight of the Navigator, Hocus Pocus, Ed Wood and Mars Attacks! Yet, all this was nothing compared to what would happen when she took on the role of New York columnist Carrie Bradshaw in the woman-led tour de force that was Sex and the City.

Now that the programme has finished its six season run, Ms Parker has been left to pick up her film career and carry on without the comfort of a regular job. “It’s been really scary leaving the show,” she says with surety. “This endless gypsy-like life where I am like the new kid at school all the time, which for some people is really easy, but for me it’s not. I don’t really like change and I like everything to be the same constantly, except I love being terrified.”

Despite finding the whole experience daunting she doesn’t feel it gets in the way of her choosing what roles to play. “I aim to do something new that seems challenging to me. I consider what story I haven’t told, what person I haven’t played. I like the idea very much of just trying to play characters I haven’t played before in unfamiliar environments alongside new people.”

In choosing the films to make, it would be easy to imagine that she has become typecast as her Sex and the City character, but Parker disagrees. “It’s up to me to make smart choices. I have plenty of opportunities and I have had plenty of chances to play a mediocre version of the story that we told for so long but I don’t really have an interest in that. I don’t think my character in Family Stone was anything like Carrie Bradshaw, I don’t think Paula [in Failure to Launch] is anything like Carrie Bradshaw and I don’t think the part I played in Spinning Butter is anything like Carrie Bradshaw. I feel very lucky at the moment.”

In Failure to Launch she stars alongside Matthew McConaughey as a woman hired by McConaughey’s parents to make their 35-year-old son finally move out of their house. “I was actually quite concerned about the title,” Parker smiles.

It’s a common theme in romcoms that women enter into relationships with the belief that they can change the behaviour of the man they are seeing. “I would say that anyone who thinks they can really change another person, let alone a man, is slightly misguided. I have so many single women friends who date men who have big warning signs all over them and they really feel they are uniquely skilled in some way that they will be the person who finally fixes all these flaws. I personally find men far more complicated and interesting than that,” she adds with a flirty grin.

Aside from the film raising the ‘issue’ of Peter Pan syndrome, she still wants to offer her son the same kind of home comforts. “He already knows that when he’s married he’s supposed to come home every Friday no matter what his wife says and have dinner with me. We’ve already decided his wife’s name will be Mary.”

Should she find herself in the same situation, however, she will always have the DVD of this film to show him, though she feels that’s a little brash. “At the age of three it’s really hard for me to imagine letting him leave the house let alone forcing him out the door with a DVD of mine. It’s going to be a pretty tough pill to go out to the world and live in a studio apartment but that’s one of the beautiful challenges of being an adult and being independent. I can see why it’s very appealing to live at home but I would also say to somebody it’s equally thrilling to stand on your own and grapple with life’s complex and difficult situations.”

Such grown up situations meet us all in life and we always end up having to do something we don’t especially wish to do. In Parker’s career that situation is paintballing. “I’m boring, I guess. Matthew is very athletic. He’s really skilled, He’s a real outdoors person, I’m a real city person. But, you know, I got to do the paintballing and now I never have to do it again.”