Sarah Jessica Parker has added her voice to the #MeToo movement, revealing that during filming for Sex and the City she reported a ‘big movie star’ who was involved in the series for inappropriate behaviour.
The actress – who starred as Carrie Bradshaw on the show from 1998 until 2004 – told NPR’s Fresh Air about the experience, saying she went to her agent and “within hours everything had changed. … He said to them, ‘If this continues, I have sent her a ticket, a one-way ticket out of this city’ — where I was shooting — ‘and she will not be returning’.”
She said she no longer had to put up with jokes being made about her figure or “what people thought they could talk me into doing”.
“All these men. All these men. That stopped.”
But she added, “The nature of the person who I felt was really the instigator, this was a grown man, a very big movie star and you know he was baked, meaning his personality, it was cooked. He was a formed person and that wasn’t going to change.”
Parker, who is now starring in an HBO comedy series, Divorce, in which she plays Frances, a mother of two navigating the dissolution of her marriage, explained, “I think no matter how evolved or how modern I thought I was … I didn’t feel entirely in a position — no matter what my role was on set — I didn’t feel as powerful as the man who was behaving inappropriately, which … strikes me as just stunning to say out loud, because there were plenty of occasions where it was happening and I was in a different position and I was as powerful. I mean, I had every right to say, ‘This is inappropriate.’ I could have felt safe in going to a superior.
Parker also opened up about how the #MeToo movement had made her reassess experiences she’d had with men throughout her career.
“It really wasn’t, I would say, until about six or eight months ago that I started recognising countless experiences of men behaving poorly, inappropriately, and all the ways that I had made it possible to keep coming to work or to remain on set, or to simply … just push it down, push it away, find a little space for it and move on,” she said.
“To be honest, I don’t know why I either wasn’t courageous or more destroyed by some of the things that I was privy to, that I was on the receiving end of.”
