Interview: Cynthia Nixon Wanted Miranda to Be 'Complicated & Messy' in AND JUST LIKE THAT

Cynthia Nixon knows that people think her Sex & the City character, Miranda Hobbes, has "lost her way" in the series reboot, And Just Like That. She disagrees.

In season two of And Just Like That, fans follow Miranda, along with Carrie Bradshaw and Charlotte York, as they navigate the journey from the complicated reality of life and friendship in their 30s to the even more complicated reality of life and friendship in their 50s.

New episodes of season two find Miranda exploring her new life. After turning it upside down in season one, she has moved to Los Angeles with her partner, Che Diaz, after leaving her longtime husband Steve.

BroadwayWorld sat down with Nixon to look back on 25 years of Sex & the City and Miranda's "brave" decisions in And Just Like That, also teasing her return to the New York stage and the upcoming season of The Gilded Age.

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Starting out, how are you feeling now that we're seeing the first few episodes of I Just Like That season two?

I'm very excited! You know, you work on something for so long and you just want it to be out in the world for particularly your friends and family, but also people on the street, you know? It's really exciting to have people being like, "Oh, how's the new season, you know?" So that's great.

Something that I've been really excited about this season is that I feel like in season one, we were introducing our new characters, but in season two we're seeing them fully operate in this world. 

I couldn't agree more. It's just seven characters, four of whom we've never met before. Like it's a lot. I just couldn't agree more. Except for LTW, we had to introduce all of the characters, not only to the audience, but even to the other characters and have them get to know each other and see how everybody was gonna fit in everybody's lives. I think we really hit the ground running in terms of our seven people and what's going on with them.

It's hit such an amazing stride this season. I'm loving it. Since it is sort of a different show than Sex and the City,  was it hard at all to play the same character in a different series?

Oh, no. You know, the three of us, or not even three of us, all of the characters that were from the original series, we've played these characters for so long and we know them so well and we know each other so well. It was just incredible. I have to say that first read through when we came back after having been away from these characters for so long, it was like one of the most magical days of my life, it really was.

You mentioned that you guys know these characters so well. Coming into this season, in this series, how much of Cynthia is in Miranda?

You know, I think that back in the original series, I felt like she was a wonderful character to play at the beginning. It was very different than anything I'd ever done before. I'd been acting for almost 20 years at that point when I did her. I had long, blonde hair and I would play a lot of shy people and spacey people and just not confident people. To play her as so cynical and acerbic and guarded and just a pessimist about everything and then just a fighter and like very fiery and always ready for a fight. It was just like nothing I had played.

So they began writing for her and I was like a very domestic person at that point. I was already the mother. I was not somebody who had ever spent a lot of time in the dating scene, I really hadn't spent any time in the dating scene. I was certainly not a corporate lawyer. So at the time it seemed very foreign to me but then they had her fall in love with Steve and they gave her a child and they gave her a home. She got a lot more like me.

I have to say that, maybe from playing her and maybe also just from growing up a bit, I learned from her more about strength and being outspoken and believing in your own opinions kind of thing.

I know some people feel like Miranda has lost her way. I don't feel that at all. I feel like, you know, not all who wander are lost. I think she was really, really stuck and really miserable and had spent so many years trying to be a good soldier and stay in this marriage that she had really outgrown and was just the breadwinner in corporate law. She did something which is hard to do at any age, but particularly in your 50s, to completely transform things and try and do all the stuff she wasn't good at.

I think she was just incredibly brave. The fact that she did it in a kind of klutzy way, I loved. I found that very endearing and I feel really in keeping with who she's always been. She's always had a Bull-in-a-China-Shop thing about her. She charges forward and often makes a mess and has to come back and put things back on the shelves. But that's the way she makes sure she doesn't stay in one place. She charges forward in the only way she knows how.

It's been amazing to see her take so many chances. And like you said, we're seeing people in their 50s make these big life decisions and I feel like that is one of the most realistic parts of the series. She's a very real person that I'm so excited to see be represented.

I mean, that was always one of the great things about the original show was we love these women, we admired them, we didn't always agree with their choices. I love Wonder Woman but I don't want to play Wonder Woman. I don't want to play a two dimensional perfect goddess.

This is what feminism to me is. It's not about every woman we see on screen is perfect in every way. That's sort of the opposite. That's the patriarchal lie, right? That you're Donna Reed and you're always gorgeous with your hair done in a gown, like vacuuming and welcoming your husband home, with every hair in place. But actually, we want to be Tony Soprano too, even though we don't want to kill anybody, you know what I mean? We want to be complicated and messy and not always the good guy.

You also directed episodes again this season. For you as an actor, as you're directing, does that type of control that you have over the episode affect your performance as an actress at all?

I don't think it does, honestly. I'm always a person who has always loved to watch dailies, the rushes of what we shot. When I was 12, one of my first big things that I did was I did a movie called Little Darlings and we were shot in a very small town in Georgia. At the end of the day, the whole cast and crew would gather and watch the dailies from two days before that the film would have been processed. So I grew up and I thought that's what you did.

So back in the day with Sex and the City, I was the only person who was like clamoring, like, "Please let me watch the dailies." At first they were resistant because they thought I was all gonna be complaining about my lighting or my hair or something. I was like, "No, I have no interest in those things." But I really wanna see the performance and see, you know, all the different takes, what it's like. I found that it was enormously helpful to me.

The thing that I still keep trying to learn is that after all these years later, I have this idea in my head of how I want a particular scene to be and I keep trying to achieve that over and over and over and that the downside of that is then you have a lot of takes that all look the same. The thing to really do is to just try and free yourself and do one. The first one the way you think it should be, and then really just do something different so that you can find something more interesting and less planned, but also you can give the director a choice in the editing room, which was like something that seems so moving at the time now seems like, wow, that's really over the top. Don't we have a smaller one?

So I have to say, it doesn't really affect my performance except I have less time to worry about my particular performance. I got too much else to be thinking about. My performance is the least of it, right? It's like, "It's about to rain. What am I gonna do?"

I know you can't give too much away but what can we expect from those episodes that you've directed this season?

I'm very pleased with them. They're very different in tone. They're episodes five and six. Five is more of a romp and I think six is more of a kind of an emotional episode. A lot of big emotional things happen in it. I think the episode I directed last season also was number six. It's like a sweet spot in the season. It's like just halfway through.

In the first season with Mr. Big Dying was this catastrophic event that started this season, by the time we reached six was the time of Carrie finally beginning to open up again from the trauma of what had happened. I think in this season, it's sort of the opposite. Like we start on a very light note and a lot of sex and more in the spirit of the original series, lot of hijinks. But by episode six, we're finally, coming down to earth and sort of internalizing a little bit and dealing with things in a more emotional way. Both episodes are really great, but episode six is particularly precious to me, I guess.

I love that you got the two sides, like a fun, rompy episode and then the emotional one. I feel like that is so much of what And Just Like That is. We have fun episodes but it's all grounded in such real emotions.

Yeah and we just have just the best actors. Our actors have always been so great, but our new people. I was initially concerned, like, "Are they going to bring in a lot of young people because we're so old?" And they did not. They just brought in these magnificent actors who are just so much our peers and they just elevate everything to such an incredible extent.

I want to switch gears to The Gilded Age. What can we expect from the next season?

Oh, well, I can't say too much, of course. I guess I would say that what was really fun for me was that Ada was so much in service of other people last season. In service of her sister and in service of her niece. She was kind of the helper for everybody. This season, she has a lot of plot. [laughs] A lot of things happen to her. Not just in her vicinity, but actually to her. It's certainly very unexpected in terms of what she thought her life would be like.

As an actress, what excites you the most about diving into like a really juicy period piece drama? Especially coming off of And Just Like That.

You know, it's so funny. And Just Like That always airs first, but we've always shot The Gilded Age first.

Christine Baranski played my mom when I was 17 and 18 in The Real Thing on Broadway. I have just always worshiped her. Julian Fellow's characters are so great and he's a genius with plot, but getting to act with all these incredible Broadway actors. I mean, I think that's the real sweet spot of it on a daily basis. I mean, the clothes are so incredible and the sets are so amazing and the camera work and all that stuff, but just being with the best of Broadway, people that I've known for, 30 years, 40 years. Then occasionally there'll be a person on there that I haven't worked with, that I've always admired and get to meet finally. Or in the case of the young people on the show, people I wasn't aware of and who just astonished me with their talent.

Speaking of Broadway, since you, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis have all been on Broadway, has it ever occured to you to Sex and the City to the stage in some way?

I don't I think so. I do not like that idea. It is its own thing. It is very much a television show.

I've been to a lot of Broadway recently, and I've just been having the best time. We had seen it off Broadway, but we'd never seen Hadestown or Broadway. We went yesterday. We saw Shucked on Saturday, which we just loved, and saw Fat Ham just before that. Just thought it was so incredible. Broadway isn't fully, fully back, but there's such incredible talent happening. I like watching stuff on TV and I like going to the movies, but going to a Broadway show and not only the talent that happens up on the stage, but to be with a group of people like that and be laughing together and crying together and holding your breath together and applauding together, there's really nothing like it.

Is there anything of interest that you would like to return to the stage in? Do you want to direct on the stage?

I do. I have directed some. I've directed three plays. There is a play that I'm working on right now. We'll see what happens with that. But I guess I am going to be on stage this coming season, but it hasn't been announced yet.

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Watch the trailer for season two of And Just Like That here:

And Just Like That Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn/Max
The Gilded Age Photograph by Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO