May 2010

Newsletter SMS Alerts Version française
FIND A THEATRE FIND A MOVIE FIND IN STORE

Site Navigation

  1. Theatres
  2. Movies
  3. Events
  4. Buy Tickets
  5. Blog
  6. Video
  7. Contests
  8. Corporate Sales
  9. SCENE.ca
  10. DVD Store
 

May 2010 

Return to Table of Contents May 2010

cattrall_MAIN_may2010.jpg

Cover Story: Kim Cattrall
More to Life than Sex

On the line from London, where she’s getting great reviews for her performance in a Noel Coward play, Kim Cattrall talks about being on stage, how the acting biz has changed in 30 years and — oh yeah —Sex and the City 2


By Ingrid Randoja

The Sexcapades are in full swing.

Sex and the City 2 stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon have arrived in Las Vegas for ShoWest (the movie industry’s yearly gathering) where they’re being honoured with the convention’s 2010 Ensemble Award.

The fashionable threesome looks happy, excited, but there’s a problem; this trio should be a quartet. Kim Cattrall, the fourth Sex and the City star, is conspicuously absent from the photo op. Fortunately, it’s not due to any drama or ill will between cast mates, but because the 53-year-old is busy starring as Amanda in a critically acclaimed production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives in London’s West End.

The most seasoned actor among the SatC foursome, Cattrall is also the most industrious. Born in England, but raised in Vancouver, she began her career as a teen — debuting in director Otto Preminger’s 1975 flop Rosebud, slogged her way through ’80s dreck — Porky’s, Mannequin, Police Academy — and hit her stride in the ’90s when she was cast as Sex and the City’s sex-obsessed vixen Samantha Jones.

Her SatC success led to increasing theatre work, TV commercials and even the writing of sexually themed how-to books.

From left to right: Cynthia Nixon,
Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall,
Kristin Davis

We caught up with a tired Cattrall on the phone from London. It was near midnight, and Cattrall had stayed up late after her Private Lives performance to chat with us about SatC — well, as much as she is contractually allowed to say, her thriving theatre career and her Hollywood beginnings.

How did the performance go tonight?
“Great, really fun. I am having such a great time doing this.”

How do you relax after a performance? Have a drink, watch television?
“Oh, I come home and do some emails, I stroke my cat, I have a nice glass of wine, a very light dinner and I usually just go to bed.”

How are you handling the exertion of being on stage every night?
“I’ve been a theatre actress most of my life, so I feel very home on stage. The thing I love about the theatre is that it’s very organic — there’s a beginning, middle and end to it — and it keeps evolving. And I think this is the best play Coward wrote, it’s very funny, very heartbreaking. It’s this dance between male and female.”

That dance between male and female is also part of Sex and the City.
“But that to me is not as important as the communication between the women. Sex and the City, to me, is a show about women for women. Yes they’re in relationships, but to me it is about family, and that family is not blood, it’s love of friends.”

So you see the friendships as the key to its huge popularity?
“Yes, but I think it’s also about questioning what it means to be a woman in this point in time. It addresses issues that most women live with on a daily basis. They’re working mothers, or they are single and they are at a certain age and they didn’t get married, or they didn’t stay married, or they didn’t have kids. All these different scenarios represent women’s lives of the last 30 to 40 years and [Sex and the City] addresses post-feminism in a way that hasn’t been done before.”

The new movie is set two years after the first Sex and the City. What’s going on with Samantha at this point in time?
“You know, I can’t tell you any story points, I can’t even go into the plotlines. That’s a question I can’t answer, I’m sorry.”

It’s interesting, you not being able to talk about the movie just shows how big this franchise has become, and how people are so invested in these films.
“I don’t really understand it myself, I guess it’s the surprise factor for the fans. It’s sort of like waiting for Christmas — they want to peek at the package but they don’t really want to open it and know what’s inside until the time is right…. So many women came out to support the first film. They came out more than once, and dressed up for it. It became an occasion, which was truly extraordinary, so I think in some ways it’s for those fans that we want to keep it under wraps and keep the secrets.”

So then let’s talk about you playing Samantha. You’re one of the few female actors who’s played the same character over a long period of time, much like Sigourney Weaver playing Ripley in the Alien films, or Helen Mirren playing Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, not many actors have that opportunity.   
“It’s true. I feel very grateful for this character and I love her, but I feel as an actress I like the challenge of playing someone completely different.”

And you’ve played a lot of characters, considering you signed a long-term contact with Universal Studios when you were just 18. It’s hard to imagine actors working under that system in today’s Hollywood.
“Yeah, these contracts were quite popular, they were these seven-year contracts, which don’t exist any more. When I look back on it now, it seems so antiquated, but that’s how it was in the late ’70s. It was myself, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sharon Gless, I mean we were all coming up at the same time and were friends…. It was kind of a fantastic thing because the studio was sort of looking after you and there was a feeling you were a part of an elite group in that old studio system. I feel as if I have come up through the ranks, doing a couple of lines in a TV show to starring in movies, and really learning and building my craft.”

And you seem to really love what you are doing now.
“It’s a very happy time in my life. Working in the West End on a great play with a wonderful role and cast is so much better than sitting in a trailer in Vancouver waiting to do a populist movie with special effects. I don’t get the same kind of charge out of that.”

Ingrid Randoja is the deputy editor of Famous.

Uncovering the Plot

Kim Cattrall may be all coy about Sex and the City 2’s plot, but Warner Brothers gave sex-starved fans something to drool over during their ShoWest presentation — a second SatC trailer. Press who saw the trailer sent out dispatches a.s.a.p. Some of the highlights include:
• Stanford and Anthony tie the knot with Liza Minnelli officiating. Mazel Tov!
• Miranda is still with Steve but feels fed up with her job and wants to become a full-time mother to son Brady.
• Charlotte — now with two kids — fears hubby Harry is having an affair with a hot Irish nanny.
• Samantha takes the girls to Abu Dhabi where her ex-boy toy Smith Jerrod is filming a movie. It’s in Abu Dhabi where Carrie meets ex-lover Aidan (John Corbett) in a market. But not so fast... Corbett told Movieline magazine that simply is not the case. “Yeah, if you go online you’ll see that they’ve been saying that for months and months,” says Corbett. “They have a picture of me from Istanbul years ago and they just say that I was in Morocco shooting the sequel so I don’t know who is blowing that stuff up.”

Movieline asked one more time to, you know, be sure: “So one hundred percent you are not in Sex and the City 2?”

“One hundred percent,” he replied.

The plot thickens...

—Ingrid Randoja



  1. Top Movies and Events

  2. More at Cineplex.com

  3. In The DVD Store

  4. Escape Wth Us!

    As the largest motion picture exhibitor in Canada, Cineplex Entertainment operates 130 theatres with 1,347 screens serving more than 70 million guests annually. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Cineplex Entertainment operates theatres from British Columbia to Quebec and is the largest exhibitor of digital, 3D and IMAX projection technologies in the country.