This weekend, Cynthia Nixon went into damage limitation mode. Since it was first announced, every last breath of conversation surrounding the second season of HBO’s And Just Like That … has revolved around one thing and one thing only: Kim Cattrall’s return as Samantha Jones.
The reason for this makes perfect sense. After all, it is scientifically impossible to maintain any sort of discourse whatsoever about a show as shapeless and mediocre as And Just Like That …, so of course people are going to latch on to the fact that arguably the most iconic Sex and the City character of all is set to make a triumphant comeback.
But, still, Cynthia Nixon is concerned, telling the Times: “I worry that with all the buildup people are going to wonder what all the fuss was about. It’s important to know that it is a very brief, very small cameo.” It barely even counts as that, in fact, given that Cattrall had no physical interaction whatsoever with any of the programme’s cast. She turned up when nobody else was around, ran her lines and then went home again. The scene, when we see it, will be stitched together through nothing but TV magic.
Not that we should be particularly surprised, of course. This sort of thing is starting to happen more and more. Pedro Pascal is one of the hottest, most in demand, most instantly recognisable actors working in television today. So it has never quite made sense that one of his biggest shows, The Mandalorian, requires his face to be almost permanently concealed by a giant metal helmet.
Recently, Pascal has made his displeasure about this public. First, he has been vocal about wanting his character to be replaced by Katee Sackhoff’s Bo-Katan Kryze in future seasons. And, second, he’s barely even on set to begin with. Although season one of The Mandalorian featured the flesh and blood Pascal wearing his costume in front of the camera, over time his performance has been increasingly taken over by a stand-in, with Pascal describing the third and latest season as “mostly a voiceover gig”.
The official reason, as Pascal recently revealed during a Hollywood Reporter roundtable, is that “frankly, my body wasn’t up for the task as far as, like, the four months of [being in the suit]”. But it may also be the case that Pascal likes it when people can actually see his face, because then they get to scream the word “daddy” at him on the internet, so he reduced his Mandalorian role to take on more public-facing work such as The Last of Us.
This is not a particularly new phenomenon. As interesting as The Good Wife was in its time, later episodes became overshadowed by a reported rift between its stars Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi. The pair initially played best friends, and shared a ton of scenes. But as the show rolled on, viewers began to notice that – aside from a few edited-together phone conversations – they were no longer in any scenes together.
Fans were quick to gossip about the possible cause of this, citing a potential feud that began when Panjabi won an Emmy and Margulies didn’t. To try to quell these rumours, the pair of them began to feature in more scenes together, but that only made things worse. When they did share a screen, it became increasingly clear that they were never actually on camera together, almost as if they refused to be on set at the same time.
And then came the awful climax. Panjabi eventually left The Good Wife, and one of her final scenes saw her character drink at a bar with Margulies. This required them to, for the first time in years, actually share a screen together. Except it became incredibly evident that they did not. In their final scene, the dialogue was weirdly stilted, the staging was flat and – crucially – both actors were lit differently. The feud, it seemed, was apparently so terminal that the director had to film their final scene separately, and then paste their performances together on green screen. It was an inept, disappointing way to go.
But this was years ago, and stars seem to have wised up enough to be transparent about this sort of thing. Pascal is happy for us to know that it isn’t him in the suit any more. Everyone involved in And Just Like That … wants to make it perfectly clear that Kim Cattrall had no interaction with anyone for her scene. And because of this, nobody seems to mind. And, so long as these absences are dealt with less cack-handedly than in The Good Wife, we have no reason to complain about it.
