Cynthia Nixon Addresses Negative Fan Reactions to 'AJLT'

Cynthia Nixon, the Emmy-winning Sex and the City and The Gilded Age star, 57, returns for the 11-episode sophomore season of And Just Like That… (June 22 on Max). Reprising her role as Miranda Hobbes, Nixon will once again join Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie and Kristin Davis as Charlotte as the women continue their journey of self-discovery in the sequel to the New York City-based series. Nixon also returns as Ada Brook in The Gilded Age (HBO) in the Fall.

Parade sat down with Nixon to get the scoop on all her latest projects:

Walter Scott: What can we look forward to in second season of And Just Like That…? 

Nixon: Where we left Miranda at the end of the last season, she had made this big, bold decision to renounce her very coveted internship and follow Che (Sara Ramirez) to California to be the girlfriend of the new TV star. That’s where we pick them up, and it has lots of wonderful things and lots of pitfalls as one could imagine. I can’t say much more than that.

Related: Everything We Know About And Just Like That Season 2

Miranda has had one of the most transformative storylines. How do you see her now that she’s no longer a corporate attorney? Is she in search of happiness?

I think she’s really in search of a purpose. When she was younger, she really wanted to be successful. That was her No. 1 thing. She wanted to be successful, and she wanted to match up to the big boys and not let her gender hold her back. She wanted to be a partner in a big law firm, she wanted to earn a big salary, and she wanted all the status that came with it. We maybe think of Charlotte as being status-oriented but, actually, in a certain way when it came to work, Miranda was very status-oriented. But now she has climbed to the top of that mountain and the view isn’t so great. She’s keenly aware that she’s much closer to the end of her life than she is to the beginning. I think she’s having an Is that all there is? kind of a moment.

She doesn’t want it to read on her tombstone: “Here lies Miranda, she was a corporate lawyer.” I think that has happened to many people in the last two years. I think the election of Donald Trump, the Black Lives Matter movement, the xenophobia that we’ve seen here, the Muslim ban, and all that stuff really woke her up. She feels like she has all these skills as an attorney and why not use them to try and make the world a better place for people who are vulnerable as opposed to lining pockets?

There’s been some negative fan reaction to Miranda’s changes. Do you think change is what Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha have always been about? 

They’ve always been on a journey of self-discovery. I think on the most basic level they were not women who the first item on their to-do list was to get married and have children. And so, if that very traditional female path is not the one that they were intending to walk down, well, what path were they going to take? And they had to, to some extent, create their own path. So, I think, yes, it’s always been a journey of self-discovery.

And even if you don’t intend to be on a journey of self-discovery in your life, life is going to make you be, right? Because as human beings we strive to have everything set and fixed—no surprises—but life doesn’t want you to be that way. So, life is always going to throw curveballs at you whether you’re looking for them or not. But I do think that these four women were always, if not looking for them, at least up for them. Maybe Charlotte a little less, but life still threw her quite a number of curveballs.

Related: All About Kristin Davis's Fantastic Family (No Husband Necessary)

With Miranda in California, will that reduce the interactions she has with Carrie and Charlotte? Is it going to be like when Samantha was in Malibu with—

With Smith Jerrod? No, no, no, no, no. No, it will not. And neither Che nor Miranda's going to be in California forever either.

Right, okay. Because the girlfriend relationships are part what viewers find so attractive.

Cynthia: Yes. They might not have the knock-down, drag-out fights that they had when they were younger, but I think they still have conflicts and disagreements. Maybe they just get through them a lot quicker because they have a little less appetite for drama than they did when they were younger.

New York City is like the fifth member of the group. What are some of your favorite things that you’ve come to love about the city? 

I’ve never lived anywhere else, I’m from here. So, it’s not so much what have I come to love about the city; I’ve always loved everything about the city. I love how small it is and yet how populous, how many different kinds of people there are. And when you have such a concentration of people, there can just be everything you want, whether it’s a particular kind of food you’re looking for, a particular kind of art, or a particular kind of music or clothing. You name it, you can find it here.

It’s a city full of busy bees and I love that it’s not a car culture. Our public transportation needs a great investment and improvement, but still, we can jet all around the city in the subway and be in a million different neighborhoods in a short space of time. Almost everything that I love comes from how populous it is.

The Gilded Age, set in the 19th century, is coming back for a second season in September. Do you think its themes are still relevant today?

Obviously, women have come a long way since the 19th century, and Americans have come a long way since the 19th century, but it’s still on the same continuum; we’re still fighting for the same thing. We’re still fighting for equality and opportunity, and we still have a long way to go but the themes are very much the same. And even though those two time periods look very different, that was the boom of the industrial revolution, and this is the technology boom.

And, so again, very much like The Gilded Age—then it was millionaires, now it’s billionaires—you have, seemingly overnight, these people who show up out of thin air and wield an enormous amount of money and power and are transforming society. And the fact that there is an awful lot of money around doesn’t necessarily mean that those people have any interest in sharing it with their workers. Quite the contrary; it seems like the more money one makes in the world the less eager one is to pay employees adequately.

Your character Ada is financially dependent on her sister and so she’s in a way subservient to her. Are there some sparks of some independence in there? 

Yes, absolutely. I think these two sisters, one widowed, one spinster, have lived together for so many years that they have become very much like a married couple. And because Agnes (Christine Baranski) has the money, she pulls all the strings and makes all the decisions. So, Ada is in the more traditionally feminine role and has to be a little more … calculating isn’t exact, strategic I guess I would say. She has to be a little more strategic and careful and not achieve her aims through a full-frontal assault but by tiptoeing around the back and sneaking in the side door.

So, who are you more like? Are you more Agnes or are you more Ada?

It depends on who I’m dealing with. I think all of us have an Agnes and an Ada inside them. I studied with [drama teacher] Uta Hagen very briefly, for like one semester, but I always remember this thing that she said which was, “You might think of yourself as a confident person or you might think of yourself as an insecure person, but there is someone in your life with whom you think you’re insecure but there are people that you feel very confident around and vice versa.”

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And so, if you’re trying to play a quality you think you don’t possess, just imagine who scares the hell out of you and intimidates you and makes you forget what you want to say. And imagine yourself in that person’s presence and all of that Ada stuff will come out. Or put yourself in [the shoes of] someone that you feel protective of and responsible for and, suddenly, you can become completely confident and powerful like Agnes.

You’ve played two first ladies—Nancy Reagan and Eleanor Roosevelt. Is there something about playing real-life characters that you enjoy?

I’ve also played Emily Dickinson, and I think that it’s fun to play someone that you admire and identify with. I’m not really a fan of Nancy Reagan, so it was very interesting to try and get myself into her headspace so that I would identify with her, and her desires would be my desires. It’s fun being able to watch footage of the person you’re playing or read their autobiography or read their poetry. Then there is something [tangible], and the work is laid out for you.

Whereas when you’re playing a fictional character, you fall back on your own resources, and you have to use your imagination. How do they walk and how do they talk? You can watch Eleanor making speeches or on a talk show. We think of Eleanor as being so very effusive and dramatic. I think it’s because so much of the footage we have of her is her public self, but she was very shy. She would have to work so hard to appear confident and cheerful in front of groups of people that she was making speeches in front of.

I watched her on a talk show, and it was like an hour-long talk show, and she wasn’t the only guest, it was a bunch of people. And she started out with her public persona but then I watched that strip away and she became far less animated and far more just conversational, and that was really enormously helpful to me. We think of Eleanor almost as a caricature of herself, but it’s because we got to see her making speeches as opposed to seeing her at home talking to a friend.

What are you passionate about besides acting? And since you ran for political offices in New York, I am thinking it’s connected to that? 

I guess social justice, economic justice. We’re living in a time where there’s just so much wealth all around us and then so much incredible poverty. And it’s not like we can’t do anything about it; we choose not to do anything about it, and we’ve just given over so much power to corporations and we’ve removed so many economic restrictions. I think we’re in the midst of a revolution, and hopefully it will be not a violent revolution.

Our young people, whether they’re our literal biological children or not, the next generation coming up, unless they’re in a handful of professions, it’s become exponentially harder for them to not just have a successful economic life but to literally pay the bills or get health care when they need it. So that has to change, and a lot of people are fighting hard to make that change.

You mentioned that Miranda’s looking at her life because she has less time, closer to death than birth. What is it that you have not yet accomplished that you would like to get done? 

I don’t know. I never have been much of a person with goals. You know what I mean? I see the immediate goal in front of me, whether it’s to make dinner tonight or do this role. I’m not good at imagining those bigger-picture things.

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