Sex and the City creator Darren Star and showrunner Michael Patrick King were not shy about getting the cast’s input on the show’s risqué topics, according to Kristin Davis.
On the most recent episode of her rewatch podcast Are You a Charlotte?, Davis and guest Oliver Hudson revisited an episode from the beloved series’ first season in which her character, Charlotte York, dates a man (Jack Koenig) who tries to pressure her into performing oral sex. Charlotte’s distaste for the act sparks a debate with Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) in which each character shares their opinions about giving and receiving oral sex.
Davis, 60, recalled Star and King first consulting each actress about the scene.
“Cynthia had remembered that when that episode was happening, that Darren and Michael Patrick came to us independently, each one of us, and said, you know, ‘How do you guys feel about blowjobs? Cause we’re trying to write this, but we realized that we’re gay men and you guys are straight women. Can you share with us your thoughts?’ ” Davis said.
“I guess we all said are different things,” she continued. “I know that I didn’t say that I didn’t like it, because I wouldn’t really say that. I might have said I don’t like someone pushing my head down, because definitely who likes that? Nobody as far as I know.”
Davis praised the series for featuring different women’s differing perspectives on the topic. “I think our show tried to show this, but I think people forget. You know, there’s different women who want different things and this is fine,” she explained, “just like there’s different men who want different things.”
She recalled Parker’s character simply telling Charlotte in the scene that she didn’t have to do something she didn’t want to.
“It’s so cute but also so important because just the idea of being able to not do something that all the men want you to do is kind of revolutionary,” Davis said. “But I mean my thought, and I don’t know what I thought at the time, my thought now would be like ‘What trauma did Charlotte have?’ ”
Davis also noted how Charlotte’s position evolved from the very first season of Sex and the City to Max’s reboot, And Just Like That, in which the character is happily married to second husband Harry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler).
“She’s in this incredible relationship with Harry, and there is a scene in And Just Like That involving a prosthetic with a blowjob that she is one hundred percent willing and initiates,” Davis said. “It’s super fascinating to think about the dynamics of that and the dynamics and talking about it from the female perspective, which I think is what hadn’t been on screen before.”
Davis has been revisiting and reconsidering the first season of Sex and the City on her podcast, which launched earlier this year. In February, she reflected on what it was like filming some of her character’s early sex scenes, telling PEOPLE she didn’t feel “protected.”
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“I had to hide in my dressing room,” she recalled. “I had to hide in my dressing room and call my manager in L.A, at two in the morning.”
While conditions improved over the show’s six-season run, becoming more about the cast “being comfortable,” Davis admitted that in the early days, “we didn’t talk about it as a group in a way that would’ve been helping and would’ve happened now. Like, if there’d been intimacy coordinators and all that stuff. There would’ve been much more discussion now, but there wasn’t then.”
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