And Just Like That… star Cynthia Nixon teases Miranda’s ‘journey of self-discovery’ in season two
Cynthia Nixon as Miranda Hobbes in And Just Like That… (HBO)
And Just Like That… season two will be filled with “wonderful things” and “pitfalls” for Miranda as she follows her heart – and Che Diaz – Cynthia Nixon has revealed.
Sex and the City fans are gearing up for a surprise-filled season two of the sequel series, and if Kim Cattrall’s shock return as Samantha wasn’t enough to clinch the deal, the upcoming run also promises a cameo from Grammy-winning artist Sam Smith and the reappearance of Carrie’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) old love interest Aidan (John Corbett).
Season one ended on a cliffhanger, with Miranda announcing that she was moving to Los Angeles to be with non-binary comic Che (Sara Ramirez).
In an interview with Parade, Nixon talked about what to expect from the couple in season two, and Miranda’s journey of self-discovery.
“Where we left Miranda at the end of the last season, she had made this big, bold decision to renounce her coveted internship and follow Che to California to be the girlfriend of the new TV star,” she said.
“That’s where we pick them up, and it has lots of wonderful things and lots of pitfalls, as one could imagine. I can’t say much more than that.”
Miranda ‘in search of purpose’ in And Just Like That…
Miranda had arguably the biggest character arc of season one of the show. After quitting her corporate lawyer job, she began studying for a master’s degree in human rights, divorced her husband of 18 years, and embarked on an intimate affair with Che, forcing her to reckon with her sexuality.
As to why this character arc – so different to the straight-laced Miranda of old – is so important, Nixon suggested that she is in “search of a purpose”.
She continued: “When she was younger, she really wanted to be successful. That was her number-one thing. She wanted to match up to the big boys and not let her gender hold her back.
“She wanted to be a partner in a big law firm, she wanted to earn a big salary and she wanted all the status that came with it.
“But now she has climbed to the top of that mountain and the view isn’t so great. She’s keenly aware that she’s much closer to the end of her life than she is to the beginning. I think she’s having an ‘is that all there is?’ kind of a moment.”
Despite some negative fan reaction to Miranda’s wild and unexpected journey, for Nixon, the Sex and the City universe has always been about change for all the lead characters.
“They’ve always been on a journey of self-discovery,” she said. “On the most basic level, they were not women [whose] first item on their to-do list was to get married and have children.
“And so, if that very traditional female path is not the one that they were intending to walk down, well, what path were they going to take? They had to, to some extent, create their own path.”
Although Che and Miranda’s relationship is a key aspect of the upcoming season, it almost didn’t happen, according to show writers Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky.
In an interview with Vanity Fair last year, they admitted that up until a week before filming, Miranda was going to make the decision to stay in New York.
“[Che and Miranda] were going to have a conversation about whether they would be seeing other people. There was a whole other sequence of their story, and it was going to end with Miranda staying,” Rottenberg said.
But things changed during a read-through when something just didn’t feel right. “We had a very spirited conversation about what Miranda should do, and what she would do,” Zuritsky added.
“Those aren’t always the same thing. So we went back and forth a lot about it, even in draft. At the end of the day, it would’ve been reassuring – even to us as writers – to have Miranda do the Miranda thing and stay for the internship and not leave New York.
“That would reassure us that the Miranda we always relied on to be this sensible, level-headed person was still there. But there was something really exciting, too, about letting that character break out of what we all expected her to do.”
And Just Like That… season two begins on Sky Comedy in the UK on Thursday (22 June).
