Kim Cattrall made her first appearance as Samantha Jones in Sex and the City‘s revival series And Just Like That.
During the season 2 finale, which started streaming on Thursday, August 24, Cattrall, 66, had a conversation with Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) over the phone about missing the “Last Supper” party at her old apartment.
“My flight’s three hours delayed, Carrie! I won’t be able to make it there in time,” Samantha said after trying to fly from Heathrow Airport in London to New York to surprise her pal. “Well, it is your apartment and I have to pay my respects.”
Samantha subsequently asked to be put on speakerphone so she could properly say goodbye to Carrie’s place. “Thank you for everything you f—king fabulous, fabulous flat,” Samantha added before wrapping up her call with Carrie. “Ta and cheerio! And have a great night.”
Since Sex and the City premiered in 1998, the series has focused on Carrie and her journey to find love in New York alongside her friends Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) and Samantha. After six seasons on HBO and two movies, Cattrall was noticeably not included in the Max revival series.
“Well, what is there to say? I told her that, you know, because of what the book business is now, it just didn’t make sense for me to keep her on as a publicist,” Parker’s character Carrie explained during season 1 of the show. “She said, ‘Fine,’ and then fired me as a friend. I understand that she was upset, but I thought I was more to her than an ATM. I always thought the four of us would be friends forever.”
The fictional former friends got back in touch through text during the season 1 finale, which aired in February 2022. Cattrall, for her part, maintained that she wasn’t interested in coming back to play Samantha again.
“The series is basically the third movie. That’s how creative it was,” she told Variety in 2022. “I was never asked to be part of the reboot. I made my feelings clear after the possible third movie, so I found out about it like everyone else did — on social media.”
Before her surprising cameo, Cattrall hinted at an offscreen feud in 2018 when she called Parker, 58, “cruel” following the death of her brother. Parker, for her part, said she was surprised by her former costar’s public comments.
“It’s very hard to talk about the situation with Kim because I’ve been so careful about not ever wanting to say anything that is unpleasant,” she explained on the “Awards Chatter” podcast in June 2022. “There has been one person talking. … I’ve spent a lot of years working really hard to always be decent to everybody on the set, to take care of people, to be responsible to and for people, both my employers and the people that I feel I’m responsible for as a producer of the show. And there just isn’t anyone else who’s ever talked about me this way.”
Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis on the set of ‘Sex And The City 2’, 2009. Shutterstock
Showrunner Michael Patrick King also addressed how the divide between Cattrall and Parker inspired the onscreen story for And Just Like That.
“I didn’t want to pretend that there was an absence — or wasn’t an absence. I wanted to reflect the reality of the fact that there was one not joining. Story wise, I came up with the idea that Samantha’s in London because we didn’t want to kill her. We love Samantha. That’s ridiculous,” he exclusively told Us Weekly in December 2021. “And life goes on when friendships break up over incidental things that become bigger things. What happens when a friend[ship] breaks up? You still remember the good stuff and you reach out every now and then, but there’s no intention of suddenly, ‘Boom, there she is again.’ It’s about that friendship between those four women that’s important.”
