And Just Like That… showrunner Michael Patrick King, who also worked on Sex and the City, has his reasons for casting actors in two different roles on the series.
Thursday’s AJLT season 2 finale saw exactly that happen when André de Shields returned as one of Nya’s ( Karen Pittman) law school colleagues after playing Charlotte’s ( Kristin Davis) tap dancing instructor in a season 4 of episode of Sex and the City.
“When I sat down to write Jean, I was like, it has to be someone royal and it has to be someone Black royalty and scholarly and poetic,” King, 68, said on Thursday’s episode of the And Just Like That… The Writers Room podcast. “So I just wrote it, really, with André in mind. And we just said, ‘Would you do this?’ And he came in and he was letter perfect.”
King acknowledged that the show did the same thing with Justin Theroux.
In Sex and the City season 1, Theroux, 52, played Jared, an up-and-coming author who briefly interacted with Carrie Bradshaw ( Sarah Jessica Parker). Then in season 2, he portrayed Vaughn Wysel, a short-story writer who got dumped by Carrie.
“He was just like, well who else I going to be better in that part than him?” King said of Theroux.
Theroux joked to Willie Geist in 2021 that since Sex and the City follows “girls who are dating all the time, you burn through every single male actor in New York.”
“They were like, ‘Why don’t you come back?’” Theroux continued. “And their idea was that they would just shave my head. And they’re like ‘Voila! total transformation.’”
Peter Hermann also played two different characters in the SATC universe: David, a Jewish man who Charlotte briefly dated in season 6 of Sex and the City after breaking up with Harry ( Evan Handler), and George Campbell, a software engineer who Carrie accidentally knocked off his bike in AJLT season 2.
Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell chalked the repetition up to a lack of single men in N.Y.C.
“The fact that Carrie’s app designer boyfriend is the same guy that Charlotte was set up with at the synagogue in season six really speaks to the lack of eligible bachelors in New York City,” Bushnell, 64, jokingly tweeted last month.
Parker’s real-life pal Andy Cohen also made a cameo on SATC in season 4 when he appeared in the background of a scene in which Carrie went to a gay bar.
The Watch What Happens Live host, 55, came back in season 6 as a shoe salesman who assisted Carrie at a department store.
Cohen revealed in 2019 he auditioned for the part of Anthony Marentino, which eventually went to Mario Cantone.
“I don’t think the expectation was for it to wind up being such a huge part,” Cohen said on WWHL. “Mario is so great that they were probably like, ‘Okay, well we have to.’”
And Just Like That… and Sex and the City are streaming in full on Max.
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