There may be moments in Sex And The City that are a tad horrifying to watch in hindsight, but Cynthia Nixon has revealed there was one scrapped scene that edged a little too close to looking like an actual slasher.
Cynthia – who played Miranda in all six seasons of the hit TV series, as well as its revival And Just Like That – recalled one deleted sequence that was shot similarly to Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 horror film Psycho.
Dishing out the details during a recent episode of Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson, the Emmy winner recalled a moment from the season four episode What’s Sex Got to Do with It? that almost looked very different.
“[It was] in that episode where Miranda’s not having sex but she’s eating a lot of chocolate cake and she tries to buy a whole cake and it’s like $80 and she’s like, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m not going to spend $80’, so she goes and buys like a Duncan Hines mix and makes herself a cake,” Cynthia said.
“And then she can’t stop eating it. She eats piece after piece after piece. And then finally she has to throw it in the trash and pours like, detergent on it.”
The actor and activist went on to share that what director Alan Coulter initially shot was “kind of like Psycho”, the black-and-white Hitchcock classic which features the famous shower murder scene.
Cynthia explained: “It was like a lot of quick cuts. She was, like, rabid and she would, like, eat it with her hand and like ‘nom nom nom nom nom’. And she’s like, slid down the refrigerator leaving this – we might have even shot it in black and white, I don’t remember – streaks of chocolate… ”
However, the scene didn’t end up making the cut because it was apparently too different to the show’s usual style.
“Michael Patrick [King, the show’s executive producer] saw this thing and he screamed,” Cynthai admitted. “He was like, ‘We can’t put this in our show! This has nothing to do with our show!’.
“And also how does Miranda recover from that? Are we going to go and find her in the loony bin? Like she’s lost her mind. So we had to reshoot it in a more mundane way.”
Cynthia has since stepped up to the director’s chair herself for some episodes of And Just Like That, which revisits Miranda, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Charlotte York’s (Kristin Davis) lives in New York City.
Their co-star Kim Cattrall (who plays Samantha Jones) famously has not returned for the spin-off, except for a brief cameo in the season two finale.