With ‘And Just Like That’ and ‘Gilded Age,’ Cynthia Nixon Dominates HBO Max

CUL: Cynthia Nixon — Cynthia Nixon of the film ‘Stray Dolls’ poses for a portrait during the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival at Spring Studio on April 27, 2019 in New York City.

Corey Nickols/Contour by Getty

“It is wonderful to take a character that you think you know who she is, and then put her in these situations that she never dreamed of.”

Cynthia Nixon is all over HBO Max at the moment. Between returning to play Miranda in the Sex and The City reimagined series And Just Like That and Ada on The Gilded Age, Nixon is balancing two very different women, yet with some similarities. “Miranda is in situations that she has no experience and is not very good at yet. Ada is very similar in [that] she’s in over her head, and she’s so scared.” With both characters in their third seasons, Nixon continues to be excited about them. “It is wonderful to take a character that you think you know, and then put her in these situations that she never dreamed of.” In many ways Nixon relates to Ada more. “When I started to play Miranda, I felt like I had really no personal experiences that I could bring…. Ada I sort of more naturally relate to.” Perhaps because “I don’t feel like I’m a person who likes to take risks,” unlike Miranda. But Nixon did learn one thing Ada and Miranda share. “They both live in New York—but actually! Oh, that’s weird—” suddenly realizing for the first time, “they’re both from Pennsylvania. Oh, wow.”

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Editor’s Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication.

Cynthia Nixon (L) and Sarah Jessica Parker (R) in And Just Like That.

Craig Blankenhorn/Max

Miranda is such an iconic character, and she’s really resonated across generations, especially now that episodes are available on Netflix. What’s your reaction to how so many viewers identified with Miranda and her journey?

So, we started doing this show in ’97; we did the pilot, and I know exactly how long, because my son is 28 and he was 8 months old when we did the pilot. And after the show ended, I can’t remember if the movies had happened yet or not, but people started saying that Miranda was really gaining in popularity from having been the least popular. And I was like, “The least popular?” I had no idea, but I guess she was the least glamorous. And so I think people who are really gravitating toward the glamour, she had less to offer them. But I do feel like Miranda was thought of, rightly so, as kind of didactic and on a soapbox. Not that I would know anything about that, but once years [had] passed, and a lot of the things that Miranda was advocating for moved from a slightly more fringe position, more to kind of the center of the culture, there was this embrace that people really started identifying [with her]. And there was a book that I was very flattered by that came out, called We Should All Be Mirandas. I think the four original women were very identifiable types, but perhaps Miranda was in some ways the most urban because she was [working] horrifying hours of work and just being a work machine. And women and gay men would always come up to me and say, “I’m Miranda.” And then I have straight men come up to me and say, “You’re every woman I’ve ever dated.”

Speaking of dating, let’s talk about Miranda and Steve’s relationship. In a recent interview, you mentioned that Miranda and Steve’s relationship was never meant to be an endgame. What do you think Miranda’s journey says about the complexities of long-term relationships, as well as self-discovery?

I guess what I would say is, you know, Miranda and Steve’s relationship, as Steve reminded her when things were really devolving, she could never really make up her mind whether she really wanted to be with him in the big overall “till death do us part” kind of way. It’s one of the reasons they were on-again, off-again, you know? I think he offered her so much. I think they had great sexual chemistry, and I think that Miranda was so cynical about men, and he taught her to trust and that she could be safe in a relationship where she wasn’t holding back. So I think that was very important in terms of their romance, their marriage and her personal development. But I think at the end of the day, the quandary, the things that she was never really sure about came to the fore that—after a lot of years of marriage, a lot of years of which I think were very good, and a kid that they both love and are so proud of—I think in the end, he wasn’t enough for her. Because I do think that when marriages or long-time romantic relationships end, I feel so often that they end because one person wants to keep discovering and the other person is like, I just like to stay here, I’m really happy. And I think she tried to stay in one place with him for a long time, but at the end, it was just killing her.

Cynthia Nixon in And Just Like That

Craig Blankenhorn/Max

Talk to me about your approach to Miranda’s evolution, especially her coming out and her relationship with Che Díaz. What conversations did you have with the creative team about approaching this story?

We really had no conversations. When the idea of this second series came up, I had a lot of questions, and I had a lot of trepidation. Maybe 90-something percent of the original show I love, but there were things that I really did not love, and I love them even less now. And one of them was how unbelievably white the show was. And so certainly that was front and center, if we were going to continue the story, they couldn’t just be these white people anymore. But also to sort of redo what we had done wrong, but also the culture has moved and to open it up in every way, not just ethnically but sexually. Queer people, non-binary people, trans people, include that in the diversity of the show. So essentially, Michael Patrick King, who was our creator, really just called me on the phone and he was like, “Should we make Miranda queer?” And I was like, “Sure. Why not?” I was like, if we’re trying to queer the show in all these other ways, new people that we’re bringing in, we have this queer actress already, that’s such a part of the show, the original show, why not just let her go there?

Season three introduces a new romantic interest for Miranda. What excites you about this dynamic, and what do you hope viewers take away from Miranda’s long-going search for fulfillment?

I think that, as I was talking about with Steve, I think he was really important in her development and her opening up emotionally, and that was a huge thing that he did for her. But then I think that Miranda had an awakening, a political awakening, that partly happened in the interim, when we weren’t following these characters, but she reports about it, about the election of Donald Trump, and what a wake-up call that was. And I think that she speaks very specifically, if briefly, about the Muslim ban dropping in the early days of the first Trump presidency, and about how she was watching it on TV and watching all these attorneys flock to JFK [airport] to do what they could to help. In the next year, after having spent so long in corporate law, she felt like, what have I done with my life? And like the world’s on fire in so many ways. How can I be part of enabling that? Why can’t I be part of the solution? So I think when we pick up with her, she’s left her job, she’s gone back to school, she’s trying to figure out how she can evolve into this next chapter. And I think when she meets Che Díaz, again, [who] she just has this great sexual chemistry with but also they’re just a wildly charismatic, funny, smart person. She’s partly dazzled by their celebrity, I think, but also they represent a world, an activist world that she wants so deeply to be a part of, so it’s really hard to tease out how much it’s Che in their own body, and Che with the background in which they are situated, that world that Miranda wants so badly to step into, that she’s also trying to step into with Nya Wallace, a professor, and does it very clumsily at first, but like such a hunger and such an eagerness to make up the lost home.

(L) Cynthia Nixon and (R) Christine Baranski.

Karolina Wojtasik/HBO

So let’s talk about The Gilded Age. First off, can you give us a sense of what viewers can expect in this change in dynamics in her household, and maybe the way that she views herself?

So this was a person, a very shy person, who spent her life living on her sister’s charity and goodwill, having to never confront directly, always having to go around. And then this last season, she fell in love, this tremendous love, and they got married, and it was so wonderful. And then he died. It was just unimaginable. Then, at the very final moments of the last episode last season, we discovered that actually he was a very wealthy man and has left [her] all this money at the same moment that her sister’s son has lost all of the family money.

So we’ve gone from being the person living on the charity in an upstairs bedroom to all of a sudden being the mistress of the house and the staff answering to her directives. Look, she’s been under her sister’s son for a very long time, and I think that she’s also like the hero—they were going to lose the house, they were going to have to let everyone go, and she’s come in and saved the day, and she now is a woman of means and is so focused on virtue and wanting to do good in the world and wanting to be a good person, partly from her religiosity and partly from just her sense of ethics. She dives first into a number of her different social causes that we’ll see this season, which is temperance, which really appeals to Sarah, but also she is very out of her depth. And she knows she’s very out of her depth in terms of being the person in charge and being the boss.

When you have TV series that go on for years and have multiple episodes, a really crafty TV show finds like, five or six, whatever, funny situations, and just keeps changing the windows, dressing and putting those characters back in those situations, because we know the audience loves it. And a really good TV show, which I think both of these shows are, is constantly finding ways to challenge the characters and put them in situations that we’ve never seen them in before. So very much in the way in which Miranda is in situations that she has no experience and is not very good at yet. Ada is very similar in [that] she’s in over her head, and she’s so scared, and her sister is there being the peanut gallery. It’s sort of like they’re two different political parties, and one of them has been in power for a long time, and now all of a sudden, the other one is in power and has all these great ideas about what they’re meant to do. And now the people who have had more experience, more recently, are there insulting, complaining, poking holes in opposition.

I’d love to know the challenges and the opportunities that this storyline specifically has presented for you as an actor?

Well, it’s funny, most people, of course, know me as Miranda, but I’m 59, and I have been acting since I was 12, so I’ve played a lot of roles. And at the time I was cast as Miranda— when I was 31, I believe—the roles that I played were so much more like Ada. I would play optimistic, friendly, shy, virtuous, hippies and waifs and people who were wearing a banner. So, it’s been wonderful to, later in life, return to that kind of a character.

And I think that Mike Langer, who is one of our directors and kind of our showrunner, at least initially, on The Gilded Age, saw me in this play that I did, Little Foxes with Laura Linney, where we switched between these two roles. One of them was the leading role, and she was like a very glamorous, ambitious, ruthless, murderous person. And the other was her sister-in-law, who was well brought up and very shy and had a terrible drinking problem and was abused by her husband and was just holding on to life so hard. And I think that they saw me in that, and was like, “Hey, she might be good for this Ada part.” But again, it is so wonderful to play a role like that. And I had a godmother who was very dear to me, who was never married, never had children, and I really sort of channeled her, I think, a bit for Ada. But it is wonderful to take a character that you think you know who she is, and then put her in these situations that she never dreamed of. When they told me at the end of the first season that they were planning to get her married next season. I mean, my jaw just dropped, I could never imagine that they would do something [like that]. Take her somewhere so far afield, and it was apparently just the beginning.

What do you see as the differences or the similarities between Ada Brook and Miranda Hobbes?

At the moment, they both shun alcohol, and that’s pretty much it. I guess they have both been married and are no longer married, but they’re just about as different as people can be. Particularly if you think of old Miranda, pre-Steve Miranda, who was so all about work, all about ambition, feminism was like the main quality that they had, wanting to compete with the big boys, wanting to make partner, had really very little interest or use in what we would call her feminine side, not interested in marriage, not interested in children, not interested in domestic life of any kind. And of course, Ada is not a cynic. She is a pure romantic at heart, and she’s quite literally the domestic sphere.

I just was reminded of one more similarity between the characters, both are from New York.

They both live in New York, but actually, oh, that’s weird, they’re both from Pennsylvania. Oh, wow, because Agnes and Ada and their brother, who we never meet, they come from Pennsylvania, where Peggy also comes from. That’s the whole connection they have, the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Youth. And Miranda, we only know this because her mother dies in an episode, and she goes home, and we learned that she’s from Philadelphia, because we have two writers, Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky, who wrote in the original show and wrote on this show, and they’re childhood friends, and they always write together, and they’re from Philadelphia, which is why I think Miranda ended up being from Philadelphia. So they’re both Pennsylvania transplants.

How have your own experiences influenced your portrayal of Ada Brooke and Miranda Hobbs?

So when I started to play Miranda, I felt like I had really no personal experiences that I could bring to the fore. I think I’m smart, and she thinks she’s smart, and we’re both very focused on work, but that was kind of it. I never really dated. I never went out on dates. I would find a guy that I liked, and we would go out for a year or two or five or 15, or whatever. So the idea of going out in the world and dating as a sport and dating dozens of people, this was very far from my experience. And again, by the time I played Miranda, I had a kid. I was already a mother. I will also just say that Miranda was so well written. Her quickie one-liners were so delicious, you just had to lean into them. And I was very focused on wearing suits and trying to look as much like a person in corporate law who doesn’t have a ton of money to be spending on clothing and jewelry. I mean, she [Pat Field, the stylist for the original series] was gonna shoot herself if she had to put me in another black suit. But I wanted it to be real. And I am naturally a blonde. My hair is, of course, colored, but I am historically a blonde, but I had flirted with gray hair in a couple of parts that I did. When I was nominated for my first Tony award, I was doing a play that I had a very long contract in, and I was in a wig, and so the guy who was doing my hair, he said, “Why don’t we do something crazy for the Tonys? Why don’t we make you red?” And it was great. So basically, when we started doing Sex and the City, we already had Sarah and Kim were both blonde, and so they were like, “Why don’t you just mix it up a little bit?” But in terms of her physical self, I think it was very important in finding that character.

But, Ada, I really, I sort of more naturally relate to, I guess, in some ways. And again, I had this godmother who was very dear to me and who really doted on me. And we I grew up pretty frugally. I grew up entirely in hand-me-downs, but [she] would take me twice a year to buy an Easter outfit and a Christmas outfit, and those are the only new clothes that I [would get]. She would take us in taxis, and she would take us out to dinner, and she would take us to Radio City [Music Hall]. But there was a kind of godmother-y thing that I really find very easy to channel. [She] would speak with some pain and not a little bitterness about being a woman of the age, she was a single woman, and she would point out to me, “You see that man, you see I’m invisible to him because I’m not attached to a man. I don’t have a man supporting me. He’s not nice, and I know he’s not. He might be nice in other areas, but I know he’s not nice,” and she would really clock it. And I think that kind of pain and that kind of feeling of a lack of power and a lack of power base and stature is something that she really was able to convey to me that I really did my best to internalize.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon speaks to attendees during a rally for universal rent control on August 16, 2018 in New York City. Cynthia Nixon, who is running against Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo for the…

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

As someone who has moved from acting to directing to activism, what have you learned about taking risks and stepping into new roles at different stages of your career?

You know, it’s really funny, I don’t feel like I’m a person who likes to take risks. And I think if you look at my life, that doesn’t seem to be true, but it’s a funny thing. I have a complicated relationship to it. I feel like so much of the early part of my life I would never try and do things that I thought I was going to fail at. So it’s very complicated. The first number of years of my acting career, number of decades, really, I wouldn’t try for roles, try too hard for roles that I thought I couldn’t get. But I think if I make up my mind to do something, I’m just going to do it come hell or high water. So certainly choosing to run against Andrew Cuomo was a very scary, big, dangerous thing to do. But I just felt like there was no one else who was going to do it, and so somebody needed to do it. And strangely, well, two things. One is that he is so famously vindictive and punishing that there was nobody who was actually in politics who would run against him, because your career would be over. And I thought he can’t really hurt me, or if he can, I can’t think of the way in which [he can], I’m sort of a little insulated from his attacks. And I also thought, in a funny way, I don’t have any real belief that I’m going to get elected. So it’s not like I’m going to take a risk and fail. It’s like I’m going to do my best, I’m going to try my hardest, but I don’t have any real illusions I’m really going to topple him, but I’m able to do a lot of other things. I’ve been able to bring attention to these IDC [Independent Democratic Conference] candidates who were trying to unseat these Democrats, and we succeeded in unseating them, who are caucusing Republicans to [take] control of New York State Senate. And you know, I can champion a whole host of this progressive legislation that has been bottled up because Andrew Cuomo doesn’t want it to see the light of day, which is why he’s empowering the Republicans to be in charge. So it’s a very complicated question. My father was a very smart person who had a lot of success in his life and had a lot of failure. And so I think that I have a very complicated relationship, and I actually feel like I often only try to do things I know I’m going to be able to do which I don’t think is good. I think failure is really important. And I think I’m sort of failure-avoidant, but I think failure is really important in terms of learning.

So having run for governor of New York, what did you learn about yourself and also politics during your campaign?

What I learned about myself and what I learned about politics was, well, two things. One, I have been acting for a long time, and pretty much from when I was 12, I was in this movie Little Darlings, it was very successful, very popular. It’s now kind of a cult classic. So I’ve had people coming up to me and recognizing on the street like since I was 12, and when I ran for governor, it was just so different. There is a way that people come up to you when you’re quote, unquote in politics, that’s so different. On the one hand, it’s very refreshing, because they actually sometimes want to talk about the issues, which is great. I’m much happier to do that than the acting stuff, but the other thing is that it’s really painful. They look at you with so much hope that you can change something in their life that really needs changing. And I would do my best to listen and tell them what I thought. But I also want to say, like, I’m not even in office. I’m just running for office, and I’m not going to get there. I’ve had a lot of people who idolize me or whatever. They love my characters or you’re famous, you’re on television or your movies. But this was something really, really different. And I found it really painful because how much people need politicians to actually do things and change things to make people’s lives better.

The thing that I learned about myself was, I think I have many qualities that make me a good person running for office. I feel like I’m able to absorb and synthesize and evaluate large swaths of information. I feel like people know who I am. That’s a plus in politics. I’m used to interacting with the public. That’s a plus in politics. I’m able to take a sheet of pages that I’ve just been handed and make it sound like these are my own thoughts. But the thing that I discovered about myself that was really surprising to me was that, acting is about telling the truth, acting is about setting up the conditions of the character in your head and in your body and believing you are that character, and then reacting naturally. My mother used to say, if you play a person with a limp, don’t try to limp. No one in the world tries to limp. You hurt your foot, and then try to walk as well as you can walk. Right? If you have to cry, don’t try to cry. No one tries to cry. And if you tried to cry, you couldn’t. Think about something that’s going to make you cry or believe in the circumstances, and then do your best not to cry. And so as an actor, I really strive to react naturally, to tell the truth, right? And what I learned is, and I don’t mean this in a negative way, politicians are not really allowed to tell the truth, that’s not your job as a politician. Like it’s your job to inspire people and encourage people and you have to just project confidence all the time, and you have to say we’re going to do it, we’re going to win, we’re going to fix this, even when you know it’s not true. And I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, it’s sort of like a parent talking to a child and being like, “We’re going to be okay.” And so I found that really hard to do, because I feel like I’ve worked so hard to if I’m having a feeling, I’m to show it on my face and in my body, but [not] in politics. Every once in a while, like Hillary Clinton will tear up, and everyone will be like, she’s human, maybe I’ll vote for her, but that is the exception, not the rule.

U.S. Rep Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) (L) and actress Cynthia Nixon (R) watch election returns during an election night gathering for New York mayoral candidate, State Rep. Zohran Mamdani (D-NY) at The Greats of Craft LIC…

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

There are those who say the Democrats lost the last presidential election because the party moved too far to the left, and yet, you see crowds coming out for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What’s your take on that?

I think that’s nonsense. I think that is complete nonsense. Kamala had an ad that was about affordable housing, and it was her most popular ad, and they didn’t play it. I think that there are swaths of the country that are freaked out by gay people, particularly trans people. There were all these people who voted for Trump the first time, who would have also voted for Bernie [Sanders]. Look, Donald Trump is good at diagnosing problems, but then he appeals to a very to a very racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, he minds all of those worst impulses in us, but also he’s good at diagnosing the problem, some of the problems, but then he lies to people about what he’s going to do about it. The problem with the Democrats, and I mean Hillary and I mean Kamala, is that they are so indebted to their donors that they’re not actually allowed to offer real solutions to people, even if sometimes it’s impenetrable. It’s like, do they believe in these solutions? Or they’re not allowed to really offer health care for all because of donations from the health care industry, from the insurance industry. There are so many ways in which our Democrats are actually not able to offer real solutions that you would think are bread-and-butter Democratic Party solutions, because I think they are being silenced by corporations and big donors. And so as a result, it’s just very flat when they’re offering and it’s not genuine. And weirdly, I know this is such a strange thing to say, Donald Trump is more genuinely himself, and people respond to that in actors, and people respond to that in candidates. And so the Democrats keep saying we’re the better people, we’re kinder, we’re gentler, we’re more inclusive, but we’re not really offering people something they can take home with them, take to the bank that actually has to do with them. But the idea that we went too far left or something, that’s to me, that’s nuts. We lose when we try to go toward the center, because it’s just flat and there’s nothing there.

With the free Palestine protests at Columbia University and other colleges, as a native New Yorker, having gone to Barnard, what are your thoughts on the protests and what’s happening?

It’s devastating what’s happening at Columbia. I’m very ashamed of my own institution. I’m very ashamed of Barnard being so punitive with its student activists. Barnard in particular. We’re so proud of our warrior women that went there, and we’re so proud of Barnard and Columbia. We hold up those ’68 protests like it was our greatest moment when I was a student. The anti-apartheid South Africa protests. We point to that as wonderful students apply and they speak about these things, and we want to give a gold star and admit them, and then when they actually try to put those things into practice. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. How these students have been treated, how violently they’ve been thrown to the ground and arrested and ousted and denied their diplomas. It’s uncomfortable, and I know that there are Jewish students at Columbia who feel very ostracized and targeted, and I don’t think they’re wrong, but I don’t think it should be an either/or, right? We have to protect Jewish students, and we have to protect not Jewish students. You have to protect Zionist students who have a great investment in Israel, but the way of protecting those students should not be vilifying and expelling and calling the police to beat peaceful students that are completely within their rights to peacefully protest, to sit on the lawn and pray and break together. Giving so much control over to Donald Trump, this is like the death knell of this university. It’s very scary what’s happening in our country, and we don’t know where the end is, because it just seems to keep going. But I think the most important thing is not to obey in advance, to stand up. And I think the idea that somehow, if we go along, if we appease, that that’s good, that somehow they’re going to go easier on us, I think the opposite is true. If they can roll through Czechoslovakia and nobody be like, they’re just gonna keep rolling. I’m not saying we can stop them, but providing absolutely no resistance as they roll through and arrest people and beat people and send people off to countries they’re not even from to imprison them. We’ve got to do everything we can to stand up and be strategic.

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“It is wonderful to take a character that you think you know who she is, and then put her in these situations that she never dreamed of.”

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