Cynthia Nixon details deleted “Sex and the City ”cake scene that was shot like Alfred Hitchcock's “Psycho”

Emlyn Travis
·3 min read
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The actress said they later re-shot the scene "in a more mundane way."

Someone call the Betty Crocker Clinic: Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon has revealed that her character’s infamous cake scene was almost a whole lot spookier.

The actress, who starred as Miranda Hobbes on the beloved series and its spinoff And Just Like That, revealed on a recent episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s On Me podcast that they originally shot the season 4 scene where Miranda eats a piece of cake from her garbage can as if it was a take from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho.

“[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 recalled. "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.”

But, “before we got to that,” Nixon said that episode director Allen Coulter tried a very different approach to the material.

“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,” she said, before making scarfing noises to show the voracity of Miranda’s consumption. “And she like, slid down the refrigerator leaving this — we might have even shot it in black and white, I don’t remember— like, the streaks of chocolate.”

The scene seems to have been attempting to evoke Psycho's legendary shower scene in which hotelier Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) repeatedly stabs guest Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) while she is taking a shower. After Norman flees the scene, Marion slowly slides down the tiled wall and attempts to step out of the shower before dying. Her blood then swirls down the drain.

The take, Nixon explained, did not make the final cut because it was so drastically different from Sex and the City’s usual style of filming.

“[Executive producer] Michael Patrick [King] 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.”

Now, Nixon said that she'd love to see the original take once again. "I'm sure he cut it together," she added. "I would just be..."

"I want that and the vomit scene," Ferguson interjected, referencing another infamously scrapped scene in which Miranda projectile vomits on a man while they're having sex.

"I know, I know," Nixon replied, "I want both, too."

Listen to Nixon discuss Sex and the City in the podcast above.

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