Candace Bushnell Reveals Which ‘SATC’ Characters Are Based on Real People: Samantha, Mr. Big, More

When Candace Bushnell wrote her “Sex and the City” column, which inspired the namesake HBO series, she pulled from real-life experiences.

“People started reading the column right away because it was, you know, about people who everybody knew,” Bushnell, 66, said on the Wednesday, April 23, episode of Kristin Davis’ “Are You a Charlotte?” podcast. “I would change the names, but I went out pretty much every single night with my notebook.”

She added, “I took actual notes and if it was, like, kind of uncomfortable, I would run to the bathroom and take notes. So, I would be in the bathroom, writing things down, like, ‘Somebody said this, somebody said that.’ Then, I would get back the next day, and I would look at all of the notes and construct a story out of it.”

According to Bushnell, sometimes fans would “ask [her] to write about” certain dating experiences from their own lives.

“Like ‘Valley of the Twenty-something Guys’ — and those were two real guys that I was hanging out with,” Bushnell teased to Davis, who played Charlotte on SATC and its current And Just Like That spinoff. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is the best material.’ But, there was also one about the twentysomething girls when they go to the Hamptons, but the Hamptons was really Staten Island.”

According to Bushnell, Charlotte pretending to be 27 years old to impress a younger guy was real — but the STD story line was not. (Onscreen, Charlotte’s much-younger beau gave her crabs after a steamy fling on the beach.)

Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” articles inspired Darren Star’s HBO series of the same name, chronicling four single girls’ dating adventures in Manhattan. In addition to Davis’ Charlotte York, the group was rounded out by Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) and Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall).

According to Bushnell, Charlotte was the only leading lady that was “really created” by Star, 63, himself.

“All the other characters [were based on real people]. There was a Miranda [and] there was a Samantha,” Bushnell said. “Samantha was pretty specifically one friend of mine, who knew everything about men and I’m actually still friends with her and then the character of Miranda was his really ballsy, smart girl … in tech before anybody was in tech.”

Mr. Big, Chris Noth’s character who eventually married Carrie, was also inspired by a real person named Ron Galotti.

“Ron and Darren loved each other and we used to hang out,” Bushnell recalled. “We rented a house in Aspen one year, and then I took Darren for the first time to the Hamptons … probably in 1995 [when] I had just done a book deal for the columns.”