Cynthia Nixon Thinks Miranda Was Always Queer on ‘Sex and the City’: She Had ‘Lesbianic Qualities’

Kate Aurthur
·3 min read
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When “And Just Like That” showrunner Michael Patrick King approached Cynthia Nixon to discuss what her character Miranda Hobbes’ trajectory would be in HBO Max’s “Sex and the City” revival, he asked her whether she wanted Miranda to be queer. After all, Nixon herself came out in 2004, and has been married to Christine Marinoni since 2012.

“I was like, ‘Sure, why not!'” Nixon recalled saying. “If we’re trying to do different stuff, and show different worlds, and show different aspects of these characters, why not do that?”

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For King’s part, in order to activate Nixon’s character, he wanted to “get Miranda out of her marriage.” So in the show’s earliest planning stages, Miranda was possibly going to have an affair with her professor, having gone back to school after quitting her job at her corporate law firm.

But Nixon said no to that idea, she said in an interview for Variety‘s cover story about Sara Ramírez — the actor who would eventually be cast to play Miranda’s new love interest, Che Diaz. “I know we’re crossing a lot of boundaries here that people have a lot of opinions about, but for me a boundary that I don’t want to see Miranda cross is dating her professor, you know? That’s not OK with me.”

When Miranda meets Che, though, she falls so head-over-heels in love with them that she leaves her husband, Steve (David Eigenberg).

To say that the romance caused an explosive reaction from viewers would be an understatement. “My friend Gregg Araki, he’s a filmmaker, said to me, ‘How does it feel to have created the most polarizing character in all 5,000 shows that are on TV?’” When King asked him to clarify, Araki cited outrageous characters currently on television such as “Vikings who are drinking children’s blood” and so on. “And what everybody’s concerned about,” King says, “is a nonbinary stand-up comic in the present day.”

For Nixon and King, though, Miranda’s decision to oust Steve for Che made complete sense. King pointed out that when it came to wedding Steve, Miranda got “married against her will almost.”

“Miranda was an anarchy character,” King continued. “She was like, ‘Why do I have to wear a dress and go out and pretend guys are smarter than they are?’”

Nixon takes King’s ideas about Miranda a step further, when asked whether she thinks Miranda was always queer.

“Yes!” she said. “Even though she was only really interested in men, I think that Miranda had many other queer and frankly, lesbianic qualities about her. And I think for a lot of gay women, she — we didn’t have a gay woman! But she was a stand-in for the gay women we didn’t have.”

Nixon continued, “Miranda has always grappled with power, and female power versus male power, and women getting the short end of the stick — and that’s a big issue for women who are queer. I think not having to be under a man’s thumb has always been one of the very appealing things that being with another woman has to offer.”

Nixon also harked back to a storyline from Season 4 of “Sex and the City,” when Samantha (Kim Cattrall) briefly dates Maria (Sônia Braga), a lesbian painter.

“Samantha we understood was actually semi-queer or a little bit queer,” she said. “And that was very different.”

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