Sex was a focal point on Sex and the City, but that doesn’t mean Kristin Davis and her costars weren’t taken aback by some of the situations they witnessed.
Davis, who played Charlotte York on the HBO series for six seasons, recalled season 1 being full of eye-opening moments. While rewatching season 1, episode 6, for her “Are You a Charlotte?” podcast, Davis, 60, looked back on Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) and Ted’s (David Aaron Baker) brief romance.
“She finds a porn magazine about spanking, and she’s kind of, like, a little miffed, which is also kind of funny because she’s Miranda,” Davis told her listeners on the Sunday, March 16, episode, noting, “Spanking kinda seems pretty benign to today’s world [but] she has to go and talk to Carrie [Bradshaw] about it.”
Davis explained that during the episode Miranda discovered a spanking video, but she made Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) watch. That moment is just the tip of the iceberg for the kinks the SATC ladies’ encounter.
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“Carrie’s already had to watch the modelizer having sex [and] secretly filming the models … and then has to have a cigarette and act like it’s fine,” Davis explained. “Now, we’ve got Miranda with this spanking video.”
The actress revealed that the spanking video leads to an even more iconic moment on the show.
“Soon we’re gonna have all of us watching the people in the window,” Davis said, asking her guest star Christine Taylor, “Do you remember this when we, like, turn our heads sideways because we’re watching people have sex?”
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Charlotte, Miranda, Carrie and Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) tilting their heads in awe while watching the video was used in teasers and trailers for the show at the time. That scene, however, stood out for another reason in Davis’ head.
“We hired two porn actors for [that],” she recalled. “Which I remember, we were like semi-traumatized about it.”
Davis added that now she thinks, “more power to them” but at the time, the sexual nature of the show was very new.
“It is kind of a theme in the beginning,” she said of the wild sex acts they highlight on the show. “I guess it makes sense because Carrie is trying to, you know, investigate relationships and sex and [learn] what do people like? What do people do?”
While Davis confessed to being “semi-traumatized” watching porn stars in action, she previously revealed that her least favorite SATC story line didn’t even involve sex.
During the March 13 episode of her podcast, Davis said that when Charlotte and her husband, Harry (Evan Handler), got food poisoning during season 6 she was not happy.
“I just hated that story line so much,” Davis shared on the podcast, revealing she tried to convince them to cut the scene, which showed the couple getting sick at home on the bathroom floor after a romantic night. “I went to Elisa Zuritsky and Julia Rottenberg [the writers of the episode] and said, ‘Please, do we have to do this? Why?’”
Her pleas went unanswered, because the writers thought it was a fun direction for the buttoned-up Charlotte. “They were like, ‘It’s so funny,’” Davis recalled. “I think it was based on a story where someone went to France and had a similar experience with their decadent cheeses, which we’re not used to here.”
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Still, she did not “like” the story. “I didn’t want to lay on the floor of the bathroom with Evan in stained T-shirts. Ick.”
Even with a few awkward moments, Davis remained part of SATC throughout its original run from 1998 to 2004. She reprised her role in 2008’s Sex and the City movie and 2010’s Sex and the City 2.
Davis reunited with both Parker, 59, and Nixon, 58, in 2021 for the Max spinoff And Just Like That … but Cattrall, 68, did not return as a full-time cast member.
