Sarah Jessica Parker Reveals She Nearly Quit ‘Sex and the City’ After Pilot Episode

May 18, 2025: Actress Sarah Jessica Parker recently revealed she almost walked away from her now-iconic role as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City before the series even began, according to Deadline.

Speaking on a podcast with her co-star Kristin Davis, the six-time Golden Globe winner said that despite enjoying filming the pilot in 1997, she felt uneasy when HBO officially picked up the show.

“When the show was picked up, I panicked,” Parker admitted. “I was like, I can’t be on a TV show. I don’t think I’m suited for that life. It’s very hard to explain. It also kind of depressed me.”

Parker, known for her eclectic film and stage roles prior to the series, said it wasn’t the project itself that unsettled her but the idea of routine and repetition that comes with long-form television.

“It was the idea of doing the same thing over and over and over again,” she said. “I think I’d always been lucky that I got to be in a television series, and then it was over… maybe one or two seasons. And then I moved on.”

She explained that the thought of committing long-term made her feel creatively stifled.

“It just kind of felt like somebody was, you know, putting their hand over my mouth or something. It was very weird,” Parker added.

The actress even approached her agents in hopes of getting out of the contract, offering to do multiple films for HBO instead. However, her agent convinced her to stay at least one year, assuring her that if she didn’t enjoy it, she could step away.

Sex and the City, based on Candace Bushnell’s New York Observer column, premiered in 1998 and went on to become a cultural phenomenon, running for six seasons until 2004. The series spawned two feature films in 2008 and 2010, cementing Parker’s legacy as one of TV’s most memorable leads.