Note: This article reveals some key plot details in HBO Max’s “And Just Like That ….”
You could have blinked and missed it. The cameo that HBO has been touting for months finally happened on the Season 2 finale of HBO’s “And Just Like That …,” all 73 seconds of it, by our generous calculations.
Samantha Jones called Carrie Bradshaw on the phone from London to tell her she wouldn’t be making it to the “last supper” at Carrie’s ludicrously huge Upper East Side brownstone apartment, where the writer had lived since her 20s and finally sold.
“My flight’s three hours delayed, Carrie,” Samantha began, lamenting that she had wanted to surprise Carrie, but now she would never make it in time. She would have to give her cross-continental well-wishes from a car that was driving away from Heathrow — including shouting encouraging words to Carrie’s apartment via speakerphone. (More details later, promise!)
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Plot-wise, Samantha’s telephonic flyby was the equivalent of a puff on a joint, a little hit of nostalgia that moved nothing forward and probably sounded funnier in the writers room but left a nice buzz in its wake. Within the world of the characters and the behind-the-scenes gossip of the series, though, that one warm, friendly phone call was just short of earth-shattering.
It marked the first time that Kim Cattrall, the actress responsible for Samantha’s sassy line deliveries and enthusiastic sex romps, has appeared on the “Sex and the City” reboot, two seasons and 21 episodes in. And for Carrie and Samantha, it showed that a bizarre rift in their once seemingly unshakable friendship had finally healed — a fissure that the writers of “AJLT” had concocted at the start of Season 1 to explain Cattrall’s absence from the tightknit four main characters after she had refused to play Samantha anymore. This came amid a swirl of reports about long-standing tensions between Cattrall and the rest of the core cast, particularly Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays Carrie and has been an executive producer on both series.
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The behind-the-scenes drama
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Before the “AJLT” finale, the last time the world laid eyes on Samantha, she was org*sming atop the hood of a Mercedes SUV on the sand dunes of East Hampton, wearing delicious black-and-pink stilettos, while a Danish architect’s thrusting buttocks and an exuberant display of fireworks marked the occasion.
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That was in 2010, in the let’s-pretend-it-didn’t-happen “Sex and the City 2” movie, which somehow managed to be more embarrassing than Charlotte’s bout with diarrhea in the first “SATC” movie.
Both movies were huge moneymakers, bringing in $415 million and almost $300 million respectively as the biggest profit generators for Warner Bros. in both of those years. But a third movie never happened, and in 2017 an anonymously sourced article in the Daily Mail blamed Cattrall’s demands for torpedoing the dreams of her “heartbroken” co-stars and fans. She wouldn’t accept the salary offer. She had insisted the studio produce other projects she wanted to make. “It’s over. I’m disappointed,” Parker told Extra a month later. “We had this beautiful, funny, heartbreaking, joyful, very relatable script and story.”
Cattrall rebutted that narrative. “Woke 2 a @MailOnline [poop emoji] storm! The only DEMAND I ever made was that I didn’t want to do a 3rd film….& that was back in 2016,” she tweeted the day after the Daily Mail article came out.
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She also booked an interview with Piers Morgan in which she debunked the idea that the original four actresses were as tight as the characters they played over endless brunches on-screen. “We’ve never been friends,” said Cattrall. “We’ve been colleagues, and in some ways that’s a very healthy place to be.”
Cattrall insisted she had never made demands about a third movie; she had simply refused to do it. “The answer was always no,” she said. “I never asked for any money. I never asked for any projects. To be thought of as some kind of diva is ridiculous.” She called out Parker specifically. “I think she could have been nicer. I really think she could have been nicer,” she said. “I don’t know what her issue is.”
Parker said on “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen” that she was “heartbroken,” hearing Cattrall’s comments about their friendship or lack thereof. “The whole week … I was really, I found it very upsetting because that’s not the way I recall our experience. It’s sad but I always think that what ties us together is this singular experience. It was a professional experience, but it became personal because it was years and years of our lives, so I’m hoping that that sort of eclipses anything that’s been recently spoken.”
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When Cattrall’s 55 year-old brother was found dead in Canada, Parker offered condolences in an Instagram comment, and Cattrall accused Parker of “exploiting” her brother’s death to bolster her “‘nice girl’ persona.”
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Writing Samantha off the show
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When putting together “AJLT,” Parker said that she and series writer-director Michael Patrick King didn’t invite Cattrall to join them and that she didn’t think she would want Cattrall on the show in any regard, “because I think there’s just too much public history of feelings on her part that she’s shared.” King said, “I have no realistic expectation of Kim Cattrall ever appearing again.”
Amid a discussion of covid in the first episode of “AJLT,” an acquaintance asks Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte where their fourth buddy is. Charlotte replies, “She’s not with us,” and then they quickly have to explain that Samantha didn’t die. She just moved to London.
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Walking home, though, Miranda gently brings the subject back up with Carrie: “It’s kind of like she’s dead, Samantha. We never talk about her.”
The ridiculous explanation for her absence is that the Samantha cut Carrie off when the author told the power publicist she no longer needed her services, the book business being what it is. “She said ‘fine’ and then fired me as a friend,” says Carrie. Unreturned phone calls, unanswered texts. A move to London for work without a word. Her pride was damaged, Miranda posits. “Look, I understand that she was upset, but I thought I was more to her than an ATM,” says Carrie, adding, “I always thought the four of us would be friends forever.”
Over the first season, Samantha pops up from time to time. She sends a gorgeous vignette of white orchids when Carrie’s husband, Big (Chris Noth), dies suddenly of a heart attack, which Carrie accepts despite insisting that the funeral have no flowers. Carrie talks on her podcast about how a friend once fished her diaphragm out of her vagin* when it got stuck, and then texts Samantha to give her a heads-up. “One of my finest hours,” she writes back. Slowly, slowly the thaw begins. By the end of the season, they talk on the phone, but we never hear it.
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As Cattrall told “Today,” she shot her scene in August from noon to 4, and then she and her partner went home and had dry martinis. Very Samantha.
Her appearance also coincides with “Sex and the City’s” 25th anniversary. “It felt like dipping my toe back in time and having a wonderful afternoon and then a great martini,” Cattrall told “Today.”
Did she want to dip her toe farther? Not a chance, said Cattrall. “That’s as far as I’m going to go.”
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How Cattrall’s return happened
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If you were going to engineer a scene so that a beloved character could make a brief appearance but the actress didn’t have to be in a room with any of her former co-stars, this would be it.
“It’s quite an experience when the CEO of HBO calls you and says, you know: ‘How can I make this happen? I want you to have fun. I want you to be comfortable.’ And he said, ‘Yes,’ to everything that I knew was right for me,” Cattrall told Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager on “Today” in June.
Cattrall, who at 67 is one year younger than Samantha, makes the phone call in style, in a silky red dress, with a sparkly silver jacket, a geometric lime-green purse and an enormous silver statement bracelet. One of the things she had wanted, she said on “The View,” was to be styled by “SATC’s” costume designer, Patricia Field, who does not work on “AJLT,” but does style Cattrall — and only Cattrall — on the actress’s new Netflix show “Glamorous,” in which she plays a former model who’s now the girlboss of her own makeup empire.
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“I just thought, If I’m going to come back, I’ve got to come back with that Samantha style. I’ve got to push it,” Cattrall told the ladies of “The View.” (In the rumored feud, Field seems to be firmly Team Cattrall.)
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Samantha’s scene in ‘AJLT’
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It’s to both Parker and Cattrall’s credit that there’s no sign of tension in the scene.
“Hello, London!” Carrie says when Samantha’s name pops up on her phone. “What’s shakin’, lady?”
We learn that Samantha heard about the last supper from Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda and Kristin Davis’s Charlotte, suggesting all is copacetic with the other ladies, too. When Samantha says she’s “f---ing furious” about the delay, Carrie casually tells her, “Don’t worry about it, we’ll just get together tomorrow,” as friends who know they’re in each other’s lives for the long run do.
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That’s a no-go, unfortunately. Samantha, who still calls Carrie “Honey,” had planned on staying just for the night and taking the first flight back in the morning. And now that she’ll miss the dinner, there’s no point in flying to New York and back.
For those keeping count, that’s Brilliant Dodge of In-Person Contact No. 2.
Carrie’s still touched. “Wait a minute, you were flying all the way to New York for an overnight?”
But of course. Samantha wanted to pay respects to Carrie’s apartment, which has been through so much with them. She asks her friend to put her on speaker and hold up the phone. “Thank you for everything, you f---ing fabulous, fabulous flat!” she shouts.
When Carrie teases her for her tinge of a British accent, Samantha replies: “Who’s Samantha? This is Annabelle Bronstein. I’m from ‘Injah.’ Ta and cheerio and have a great night.”
It’s an inside joke and makes Carrie chuckle. For the rest of us who were completely lost on that last line, it’s a reference to a moment in “SATC’s” Season 6, when Samantha finds a membership card to Soho House and pretends to be the card’s owner, Annabelle Bronstein, to access the rooftop pool during a particularly hot New York summer. When caught red-handed, she quickly adopts a truly terrible British accent, trying to convince the Soho House attendant, who’s from Sussex, that she hails from across the pond.
And just like that … Samantha air kisses the phone and drives off into the gray London afternoon.
correction
A previous version of this story incorrectly said Carrie Bradshaw lived in the West Village. Her character lives on the Upper East Side. The story has been corrected.
