Tragic Details About The Cast Of And Just Like That

The following article contains references to sexual assault, substance misuse, and eating disorders

With a rise in beige, old money aesthetics and quiet luxury, "Sex and the City" may seem like a relic of a bygone era. The much loved series prized itself on maximalist dressing, girlboss culture, and all things camp. So, with the announcement of the show's 2021 reboot, "And Just Like That..." there was initially some concern that the shenanigans of its fabulous four main characters were inharmonious with modern sensibilities, seemingly scrambling for relevance in the TikTok age. And the drama occurring behind the scenes didn't help such backlash.

First, there was the absence of Samantha, a rumored result of Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall's iconic feud (though Cattrall contends she didn't care for the script, which she said felt like a fourth "SATC" film). Then, there was Mr. Big's fate after Zoe Lister-Jones accused Chris Noth of sexual misconduct. Such claims were corroborated Kristin Davis' former stand-in, Heather Kristin, corroborated such claims, alleging in The Independent that Noth made misogynistic remarks on set. Consequently, Noth, who denied the allegations but admitted to cheating on his wife, was wiped from any future storylines in the series.

Despite these setbacks, "And Just Like That..." proved a success, having been renewed for a third season. All the while, the show's actors — both old and new — have had to overcome their own personal obstacles. Let's look at tragic details about the cast of "And Just Like That..."

Carrie Bradshaw may be the columnist-turned-podcast-host who liked to have her money where she could see it (hanging in her closet, of course), but Sarah Jessica Parker's childhood was worlds away from Jimmy Choos and champagne brunches. The star was raised on welfare in an Ohio mining town, with her family forgoing electricity and sometimes even birthdays and Christmases. At school, her lowly socioeconomic status was palpable. ”I knew I was different from the kids who pay for lunch or bring their lunch from home," she told The New York Times in 2000. "It was a stigma thing. I was not the only person receiving a free lunch, but you are aware.”

As she told People, she spent many nights in bed worrying about money, or her family's lack thereof, and often went to school hungry. But growing up poor propelled Parker towards her showbiz goals, and she began performing in ballet and theater at a young age. "I think that if I had been raised a child of privilege, I wouldn't be the working person I am today," she told Parade (via People). "I have a great appreciation for work."

Chatting to Howard Stern, she revealed that her experiences led to her mindfulness about the ephemeral nature of wealth. Subsequently, unlike Carrie Bradshaw, she has little desire for frivolous expenditure and opts to live like a regular person, driving an old car and regularly taking the New York subway.

In its original run, "Sex and the City" was praised for sensitively dealing with Samantha's breast cancer diagnosis and recovery in Season 6. Away from the cameras, it was Cynthia Nixon, who plays the politically minded Miranda Hobbes in "SATC" and its reboot, who was diagnosed with the disease.

In 2006, two years after the "SATC" finale aired, Nixon had a routine mammogram and was shocked when her doctor called her to reveal she had detected early-stage breast cancer. Because her mom had previously survived breast cancer, Nixon always had a feeling that she, too, would someday be diagnosed with the disease. "I felt scared. ... I thought, 'Oh, I don't want this to be happening,'" she told "Nightline" (via ABC News) after going public with her diagnosis in 2008. "I was very cognizant of, if it's going to happen, this is the best way for it to happen, that it's found so early, and we can just get right on it." The diagnosis was, understandably, a major worry for Nixon's wife, Christine Marinoni, and the couple's young children.

Following a lumpectomy, radiation, and the hormone therapy drug tamoxifen, which she continued to take for years after treatment, Nixon is now cancer-free. As earth-shattering as her diagnosis was, Nixon can reflect on her experience with candor. "I feel that between my experience and my mother's, breast cancer is a little bit like someone who lives next door," she told The New York Times.

While her pals are still figuring out their lives in "And Just Like That..." Charlotte York-Goldenblatt seemingly has it all together: a beautiful home, a loving husband, and two gifted, albeit rebellious) children. Behind the scenes, Kristin Davis' life was once the polar opposite of her onscreen alter ego's.

From a young age, Davis struggled with substance misuse. In an interview with Marie Claire, she divulged that she never fit in growing up in the South, and alcohol served as a coping mechanism. Her illness was so severe that she once had a bleak vision of the future, believing she wouldn't live to see 30. "That's a very weird thing to say ... I drank a lot when I was a teenager," she said, "and I don't drink anymore, because that's when I thought, you know, I'm gonna end up a car wreck. I just had a fatalistic view of the whole situation at that point." 

Eventually, alcohol began affecting her ability to perform during auditions, for which she was often hungover. At 22, she sought help and has been sober ever since. Appearing on "Origins With James Andrew Miller," Davis credited "Sex and the City" with saving her life. "I don't think I would be alive. ... Acting was the only thing that ever made me want to get sober," she explained (via ABC Radio). "I didn't have anything that was that important to me other than trying to dull my senses."

Although initially ridiculed for being bald, sweaty, and selfish in the original "Sex and the City" run, Harry Goldenblatt eventually morphed into a more likable and well-rounded character via "And Just Like That..." Loving, attentive, and eager to please, Charlotte's beau now serves as somewhat of an antithesis to Carrie's Mr. Big. Harry's aforementioned baldness — in contrast to his bodily hirsutism — is one of his defining characteristics, but there's a tragic origin story to actor Evan Handler's hair loss.

At 23, Handler was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive form of blood cancer with an extremely poor prognosis. He was given six months to live, yet he survived following four years of grueling treatment. "It's miraculous," he told The New York Times. "Only about one in 10 of the people diagnosed with what I have come out okay."

Although he survived against all odds, cancer had a lasting impact on Handler. It resulted in the permanent hairlessness for which he is famed; initially, he wore wigs and clung to the hope of growing hair again but ultimately embraced being bald. He was also told that chemotherapy would leave him infertile; however, he and his wife successfully conceived a daughter in 2007. "I had the odd experience of living life kind of backwards," he told NPR. "In my mid-20s, instead of living my young adulthood, I was reduced to essentially a dying, old man. I escaped that situation and came back to life."

New character Lisa Todd-Wexley has been a welcome addition to "And Just Like That..." The filmmaker and effortlessly stylish woman about town may appear to have it all, but she struggles with workaholic tendencies (not to mention an overly acerbic mother-in-law). Behind the scenes, actor Nicole Ari Parker has endured some family struggles of her own.

In 2005, Parker and her husband, fellow actor Boris Kodjoe, welcomed their daughter, Sophie. Despite initial chromosome count concerns during Parker's pregnancy, she gave birth without complications. However, she soon received a call from a neurologist who informed her that Sophie had a spine abnormality; she was subsequently diagnosed with the most severe form of spina bifida, a condition characterized by underdevelopment of the spine in utero, leading to malformation. "We had to come together as a new couple," Parker told People. "We went from a fairy tale to the fast track."

At 2 months old, Sophie had to undergo surgery to remove a lipoma. Two years later, she suffered bladder complications, tasking Parker and Kodjoe with catheterizing her every three hours, which proved traumatic. "One day Mommy was using a wipey and changing her diaper," Parker recalled, "and the next day I'm holding her down ... and tubing her. It was the worst feeling ever. It was saving her life, so we had to do it." Now, Sophie leads an independent life, with her proud mom seeing her off to college in 2023.

In the absence of the queen of one-liners, aka Samantha, Anthony Marentino is always on hand to deliver iconic, sassy witticisms in "And Just Like That..." For all the exuberance actor Mario Cantone brings to the role, he carries a tragic family history.

From a young age, Cantone was beset with hardship, bullied by classmates who couldn't comprehend his love of theater and injured in a car crash at 16. Three years later, his cousin was killed. Then, when he was 21, his mom died unexpectedly. Though his mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Cantone's father opted to keep her illness a secret from him and his brother, then 13, as a way of protecting them. According to Cantone, his father didn't even tell his mom that she was dying.

A succession of deaths followed. "[My mom's] sister died of a stroke after that, and her sister, my Aunt Josephine, died two years after that," he told the Orlando Sentinel. "And Jo was my favorite. ... So I lost all these women at a very early age. But my mother was the first one, and so many things were unfinished with her." He later lost his father, whom he thanked for accepting his sexuality in the year prior. Loss is central to Cantone's comedic output. In 2004, he debuted his one-man Broadway show, "Laugh Whore," inspired by his tragic yet colorful family.

Bobby Lee, who plays Carrie's affable podcast co-host, Jackie Nee, was another welcome addition to "And Just Like That..." For many years, Lee struggled with substance misuse. "When I was 17, I got sober," he told HuffPost in 2013. "I stayed sober for 12 years, but this is how comedy started for me. And you're the first person I have ever told this to." It was through his treatment in a rehab facility that Lee branched out into stand-up, having befriended the other teenage inpatients, whom he would hang out with in La Jolla (where Hollywood's famed Comedy Store has a satellite location).

Lee's substance misuse issues continued while filming "And Just Like That..." but much like his co-star Kristin Davis, he credits the series with saving his life. During a 2023 appearance on "Broad Ideas With Rachel Bilson," he recalled a particularly dark moment in his life in which he was severely inebriated prior to shooting a scene with Sarah Jessica Parker. "When I was reading the paper, the script, I couldn't even understand what the f*** it was even saying," he recalled. "And it was the most difficult scene too. I had to cross a street with her, Sarah, in the middle of New York. ... It was a nightmare." That was the moment, Lee explained, that he finally realized he had to get sober. "It's how insane our disease gets that, you know, that could've been a career ender," he added.

When "And Just Like That..." debuted, the cast members were subjected to online body shaming and ageism, which arguably wouldn't have happened if the main actors had been men. "Everyone wants to comment, pro or nay or whatever, on our hair and our faces and our this and our that," Kristin Davis told The Times. "The level of intensity of it was a shock." But for Davis, the body shaming began long before she reached middle age.

In an interview with Haute Living, Davis opened up about being incessantly mocked for her looks. "All of the body shaming I've been subjected to for the past 25 years, pretty much until recently, [is the only bad thing about playing Charlotte]," she said. She explained that the media would often compare her body to Sarah Jessica Parker's, noting that Davis — shock of shocks — had visible hips. "[Those magazines] would [write things] like 'Kristin's hips are bigger than her shoulders,' she continued, "and I'm like, 'But they're not!' And then I'm like, 'Well, who cares? What if they are?' But I mean, it's just ongoing."

But it wasn't just Hollywood and the media who shamed her; she was also ridiculed in public; for instance, when a cashier refused to sell her candy due to her supposedly large hips. Though the incident left Davis in tears, she argued that the media was ultimately responsible for the cashier's mindset. Magazines constantly propagated the notion that she needed to lose weight.

"And Just Like That..." saw major changes for Carrie Bradshaw and co. — namely, the "Sex and the City" reboot aimed to be more inclusive by introducing BIPOC and LGBTQ+ characters. One such character was Che Diaz (Sara Ramírez), a nonbinary podcaster and comedian who steals Miranda's heart. Deemed a caricature of a nonbinary person, Che faced a hefty backlash and was soon dubbed "TV's most hated character" by The New York Post. Meanwhile, The Cut made some particularly scathing remarks about Che, whom the outlet argued was a parody of Ramírez. "I'm an actor. I'm not the characters I play. I'm not Che Diaz," Ramírez told the outlet, to which writer Brock Colyar noted, "For the record, Ramírez's Instagram bio describes themself as 'abolicious' and a 'MexicanIrishNon-binaryHuman.'"

Ramírez was incredibly hurt by the remarks; in a since deleted Instagram post (via HuffPost), they referred to the piece as a "Hack Job's article, 'written' by a white gen z non-binary person who asked me serious questions but expected a comedic response I guess." Ramírez argued that the article was an attempt to dehumanize them.

Despite series creator Michael Patrick King's previous defense of Che, a January 2024 report confirmed the character would be axed from Season 3 due to the backlash. "[F]ans found them annoying," a source told the Daily Mail. "The storyline as a struggling comedian was a waste of airtime and Sara knew it."

Season 1 of "And Just Like That..." saw the introduction of human rights professor Nya Wallace, who befriended then-student Miranda. Nya, played by Karen Pittman, went on to become a series regular in Season 2, navigating love and loss alongside Carrie and her pals. Behind the scenes, Pittman knows all too well about loss.

In 2006, Pittman lost her father unexpectedly. Writing on Facebook in 2019, she reflected on the lasting impact of her grief, revealing that the news of her father's death was one of the worst days of her life. "I began a lifelong dance with grief, mortality — cumbersome emotions," she wrote. "Some days unwieldy and intimidating but other days like that odd sized ups box that you can't get in the door without dragging it and then half kicking it with your foot."

A decade after her father's death, Pittman also lost her mom. In a 2017 interview with The Interval, the actor reflected on how her dual losses had shaped her work, namely her role as a single mom (incidentally also named Nya) in the play "Pipeline." "Part of the grieving process is to reexamine relationships with the person who has died," she explained, "and so this play has been a gift for me in that way because it allows me to explore developing a character with a deep empathetic understanding of what her trajectory is."

Real estate girlboss Seema Patel has swiftly become Carrie's new BFF on "And Just Like That..." Central to Seema's persona is her unwillingness to compromise or settle for less. It seems that art imitates life: Actor Sarita Choudhury has learned to be unrelenting in her goals while navigating an industry that once deemed her less than.

Back in 1993, a Deseret News profile noted that Hollywood was struggling to cast Choudhury, who is of Indian and English descent. Although she'd received acclaim for her role in 1991's "Mississippi Masala," no one would cast her thereafter, and she kept getting rejections after appearing at auditions. "No one [in Hollywood] knew what to do with me," she told Vulture. "It was a time when there was no one really like me, or definitely no one Indian, in the acting scene. ... [I]t took a while for the industry to — I don't know if it's to 'allow me,' or that I just found a way to do it."

In her chat with Deseret, Choudhury highlighted the importance of funding women directors of color to mediate the racial biases of casting directors ("Mississippi Masala" was directed by Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair). "They realize there's no longer just a white audience out there," she said, "but they're not giving money to the right people. Like it took Julie Dash (director of 'Daughters of the Dust') ages to get money for a feature."

During Che's "And Just Like That..." tenure, the show touched upon fatphobia. Namely, Che was told to lose weight in preparation for their television appearance. Back in 2006, Sara Ramírez opened up to Glamour about their own body image struggles. Ramírez's disordered eating manifested at a young age as their mom projected her own body insecurities onto them.

Entering the entertainment industry exacerbated such issues, and the pressure to conform to restrictive ideals worsened. Subsequently, they began taking diet pills. "After six months, my body had had enough," they said. "I could feel myself getting shakier, and I grew more and more scared knowing I was putting my heart in danger." Ramírez stopped taking the pills and was able to address their internalized fatphobia head-on after being cast on "Grey's Anatomy." Although Ramírez gained weight during filming, they were surprised when series creator Shonda Rhimes embraced them with loving arms.

In 2021, Ramírez told Vogue that their relationship with their body had changed for the better. "I find that the more work I do on my inner self and my inner healing, the more it's reflected in how I treat my body, and that ultimately looks like developing a healthy relationship with oneself," they said. "It doesn't really involve guilt or shame. It involves acceptance." Moreover, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Ramírez revealed that the aforementioned "AJLT" fatphobia plot helped them address their own body issues.

When she was 2 years old, Sarah Jessica Parker's parents divorced. A year and a half later, her mom Barbra married Paul Forste, and it was through him that the family relocated from Ohio to New York when Parker was 11. Parker enjoyed a close relationship with her stepfather, and the star told NPR in 2019 that she was grateful to Forste for stepping in to take care of her family following her parents' split.

In September 2022, Parker suddenly pulled out of multiple major public appearances due to a family emergency. It was later revealed that Forste had died unexpectedly following a brief illness. He was 76. "In his last moments, he was surrounded with the love and gratitude of his adored wife Barbra of 54 years, and children, including Sarah Jessica Parker," Parker's family announced in a statement (via "Today").

On Instagram, Parker posted a photo of her stepfather as a young man, along with a heartbreaking tribute. "Strong like a bull. Til the end," she wrote. "At home and among all those who loved you dearly, you will be missed always. We will take good care of Mommy, who you worshipped for 54 years." Following the sad news, Cynthia Nixon told Page Six that her co-star was struggling to cope with the loss. "I think it's really, really tough, you know?" she said. "It's not just tough for her own loss, but certainly for her mom."

Sadly, a number of "Sex and the City" stars have died throughout the years. Willie Garson's witty and charming Stanford Blatch was a beloved staple of the series' original run, but his appearance on "And Just Like That..." was tragically fleeting.

In September 2021, Garson died of pancreatic cancer at age 57. He had been filming "AJLT" prior to his death, and the series bittersweetly addressed his absence, with Carrie receiving a goodbye letter from Stanford, who had permanently relocated to Tokyo.

For his co-stars, the loss was devastating. Mario Cantone, who played Stanford's husband, told People that he was shocked to learn of Garson's illness. "I had no idea until he told me," Cantone said. "I thought he was kidding. And then he turned his head and I saw his look and I went, and then I sat down next to him. We both cried, and it was horrible." During an appearance on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert," Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon both broke down in tears while discussing Garson's death. "Even being sick, which we didn't know about in the beginning, he still brought so much joy," Davis reflected. Nixon said she was grateful that the cast got to spend a few final days with Garson as the effects of his terminal illness became more apparent. "But it's hard," a tearful Davis said as Nixon held her hand. "I wish he was here."

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, eating disorders, or may be the victim of sexual assault, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

• The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

• The National Eating Disorders Association website or contact NEDA's Live Helpline at 1-800-931-2237. You can also receive 24/7 Crisis Support via text (send NEDA to 741-741).