Cynthia Nixon is detailing a scrapped Sex and the City scene that was shot similarly to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror film Psycho.
The actress, who reprised her role as Miranda for And Just Like That, a revival of the hit series, shared on the latest episode of the Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson podcast why the episode ultimately had to be reshot.
“[It’s] in that episode where Miranda’s not having sex but she’s eating a lot of chocolate cake and she tries to buy a whole cake and it’s like $80 and she’s like, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m not going to spend $80,’” Nixon said of the scene. “So she goes and buys like a Duncan Hines mix and makes herself a cake. And then she can’t stop eating it. She eats piece after piece after piece. And then finally she has to throw it in the trash and pours like, detergent on it.”
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She continued, “So, before we got to that, Alan Coulter, who was a very creative director, filmed a scene. It was kind of like, like Psycho. It was like a lot of quick cuts. Yes. And she would like, she was like rabid and she would like eat it with her hand and like ‘nom nom nom nom nom.’ Right, and she’s like slid down the refrigerator leaving this — we might have even shot it in black and white, I don’t remember— like this streaks of chocolate which sort of… ”
However, she explained that the initial sequence got scrapped because there was a “problem” with it being a stark departure from the show’s typical filming style.
“Yeah, [executive producer] Michael Patrick saw this thing and he screamed he was like, ‘We can’t put this in our show! This has nothing to do with our show!’” Nixon recalled. “And also how does Miranda recover from that? Are we going to go and find her in the loony bin? Like she’s lost her mind. So we had to reshoot it in a more mundane way.”
The actress starred alongside Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis and Kim Cattrall in the TV series, which ran from 1998 to 2004, and also spawned two films. Parker and Davis also returned for And Just Like That, which has been renewed for a third season on Max.
Sex and the City is currently streaming on Max and Netflix.
