Cynthia Nixon: The ‘Outlandish Physical’ Scenes in ‘Sex and the City’ Really Happened

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It’s all true! (Photo: Courtesy of HBO)

Sex and the City was full of improbable plot lines that convinced a generation of women that they, too, could own a Manolo Blahnik shoe closet in Manhattan on a writer’s salary — but as it turns out, Cynthia Nixon, aka Miranda, revealed to IMDB Asks yesterday that the dating stories and sex scenes were all based on the actual dating lives of the show’s writers. So, Carrie Bradshaw may have been based on Sex and the City creator and former dating columnist Candace Bushnell, but the antics of Bradshaw, Samantha Jones, Charlotte York, Miranda Hobbes, and the many, many, many men were based on the lives of real New Yorkers searching for love themselves.

“They had a rule in the writing that they couldn’t put anything in an episode that didn’t literally happen to someone in the writer’s room or someone they knew firsthand,” Cynthia Nixon said. “It couldn’t be, like, my father’s brother’s sister’s shoe repair guy heard once that, you know. So the outlandish physical, sexual things that happened. They really did happen.”

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A breakup based on real life. (Photo: Courtesy of HBO)

In March 2015, former Sex and the City story editor Liz Tuccillo explained to Cosmopolitan how the writers’ room worked: “The reason why this was the greatest job known to mankind is that basically we spent the first weeks — and in general the whole job — just talking about our dating lives,’ she wrote. “We were all dating so we would go out at night and come in the next morning and have some crazy story — or a story about someone else. We would spend a few weeks shaking those stories down, looking for recurring themes, finding the moments that made everyone scream, ‘Yes!’ Then somebody would be assigned to write that episode.” Tuccillo was on staff for the last two seasons of the show and wrote the infamous episode, “The Post-It Always Sticks Twice,” in which Jack Berger breaks up with Carrie Bradshaw with a post-it note.

“In the writers’ room we heard some of the more shocking things that people could say about sex that we could imagine,” Tuccillo wrote. But luckily for viewers like us, the most hilarious and cringe-worthy scenarios in these writers’ lives are immortalized on screen.

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