Cynthia Nixon Says Iconic ‘Sex and the City’ Scene Was Filmed Like Alfred Hitchock’s ‘Psycho’

Samantha Bergeson
·3 min read
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Cynthia Nixon is letting a “Sex and the City” production detail slip more than two decades later.

The actress, who reprised her role of Miranda for revival series “And Just Like That…,” said on Sony Music Entertainment’s Dinner’s On Me Podcast, hosted by Jesse Tyler Ferguson, that one scene had surprising ties to Alfred Hitchcock.

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“[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 said. “So she goes and buys like a Duncan Hine 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.”

Nixon continued, “So, before we got to that, Alan Coulter, who was a very creative director, filmed a scene.  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 and like ‘nom nom nom nom nom.’ Right, and she’s like slid down the refrigerator leaving this — we might have even shot it in black and white, I don’t remember— like this streaks of of chocolate which sort of…”

Nixon noted that it was a departure of style, which was “the problem” with the sequence and why it was later reshot.

“Yeah, Michael Patrick 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 said. “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.”

Nixon admitted that the original series, which is now streaming on Netflix, always “pushed buttons” for audiences.

“With the original show, I mean, people embraced it pretty quickly, but there was a lot of pushback,” Nixon said. “Even in the original show that was like, these are not women, these are gay men. This is written by gay men and that women don’t have sex like this, with this frequency and talk about it so dispassionately and clinically, you know, all this stuff. And for me, I love the stuff that happened with Miranda. In the in the first season and and in the second season too, you know. But I know not everybody did because I think I don’t know. It’s so funny through the through the mists of memory our show our show pushed so many boundaries but also was it’s been watched now over and over and over that it sort of also has a comfort food.”

“Sex and the City” is streaming now on Netflix.

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