Queer as Folk stars on having Kim Cattrall play their on-screen mom: 'It was magic'
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Warning: Spoilers ahead from the finale of Peacock's Queer as Folk.
The major thing Sex and the City got right about Kim Cattrall was recognizing that she's a comedic actress. And a damn good one. But, thankfully, Peacock's Queer as Folk has leaned fully into Cattrall's camp bona fides, making her Brenda Beaumont a true, and often hilarious, highlight of the newly reimagined series.
First, let's take Brenda's character description: "a martini-soaked, high society Southern debutante with trailer park roots." If that doesn't scream "GAY ICON" in five octaves, what does? As the mother of two gay sons, Julian (Ryan O'Connell) and Brodie (Devin Way), Brenda struggles to connect with them. But on set, O'Connell and Way found the opposite was true.
Peacock
"Samantha Jones had been acting as a surrogate mother for me for so long that it only made sense that she became my real TV mom," O'Connell tells EW, referring, naturally, to Cattrall's iconic SATC character.
"Kim is so incredible," he continues. "She's like, I don't know, she's just really f---ing cool. I feel like people are realizing that, based on her iconic interviews lately. She is so dry. She's so smart. She's just very perceptive. I mean, clearly she avoided filming And Just Like That, so."
"It was like waking up on Christmas morning and seeing a bunch of presents underneath the Christmas tree. It was magic," Way says of first meeting Cattrall. "I met her and had all these projections of who I thought she was going to be. And then to find out that she was so much better than that, she was so much more."
Way expected her to be unapproachable, but was pleasantly surprised that, hey, icons: they're just like us.
"When you think about an icon, you think about boundaries," Way says. "You think about how the world receives them and feels like they have ownership to them. And I didn't want her to feel unsafe around [so] many of us. So I approached her with boundaries and when I got there and she really was arms open wide with me and was so gracious and loving and tender and sweet on set, it was like smelling the sweetest perfume. That is her essence."
Peacock
For CG, who plays Shar (pronounced like the "Believe" diva) the new "zaddy" of twins — twins that are Brenda's grandchildren, thanks to Brodie's sperm donation — their on-camera relationship with Cattrall was... a bit different.
Brenda inserts herself into CG's life with Ruthie (Jesse James Keitel) to be closer to her grandbabies, but when Ruthie begins to unravel, shirking her duties as both a partner and a parent, Shar finds solace in Brenda, who's more than willing to lend an ear, among other things.
Peacock
"Something gets twirled around, and opened up, and surprisingly walked towards with those two," CG says of Shar and Brenda's relationship. "I mean, they spend a lot of time together."
They sure do. Shar twirls around and opens up an attraction in Brenda, a mutual attraction, that is midwifed by that most hackneyed of TV tropes: the karaoke number (Note: please stop doing karaoke numbers as narrative shorthand). Brenda sings — what else? — "Maybe This Time," from Cabaret, and seconds after she's hoping that maybe this time she'll "wiiiiiiiiiinnn," Shar's taking her to LGBTQIA+ pleasure town in a public bathroom. So what was it like filming a sex scene with, arguably, the queen of sex scenes?
Peacock
"I definitely had to separate the name from the human being in order to work in a place that I need and want to work with people from. So, humanizing her in a way was my first step," CG says of working with Cattrall. "And then from there, there was an ease about the work that we were doing and a chemistry that I didn't really think about being there, but was there even so. And I think we had a lot of fun."
The first season of Queer as Folk ends with a big, gay question mark as Brenda comes out, with all the pomp and circumstance befitting a martini-soaked, high society Southern debutante with trailer park roots, and Shar and Brenda seemingly rekindle their affair. Hopefully, that just means we'll see more of Cattrall camping it up as a freshly out queer woman, martini perpetually in hand.
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