Kim Cattrall vs. Sarah Jessica Parker Is TV’s Greatest Feud

There is a meme format currently doing the rounds that, if you’re still subjecting yourself to Twitter, you must have seen. “WITHOUT GOOGLING. Name a historic battle,” the original prompt-tweet reads. Underneath, there are a few earnest replies mentioning actual battles from history, but most of the 100,000 quote-tweets are from people sharing their favorite rivalries from pop culture, from sci-fi films to music and even niche reality TV shows from the mid-2000s. 

Normally, a tweet like this dies down in a week or so. But this one has been going for over a month and has now been viewed over 1.4 billion times. In the style of Carrie Bradshaw, watching these tweets appear on my timeline for the past few weeks, I couldn’t help but wonder… Why do we love feuds so much?

Speaking of Bradshaw, And Just Like That… — HBO’s Sex and the City spinoff that returns for its second season this week — has also made me think about the allure of a good, old-fashioned celebrity feud. Not because of anything on-screen, but the ongoing beef between Sarah Jessica Parker (Bradshaw) and Kim Cattrall (Samantha Jones).

After years of insisting she had played Jones “past the finish line,” fans rejoiced at the news that Cattrall had filmed a cameo for the Season Two finale. According to Variety, Cattrall will revive Jones for a phone conversation with Bradshaw. In Season One, the pair communicated via text following a period of estrangement, but Jones reappearing on-screen has taken things to a whole new level. (She did not speak to her co-stars or showrunner Michael Patrick King during filming, though).

Cattrall’s surprise cameo isn’t just a change of tune from her long-held insistence that she was totally done with the franchise. It’s also a gear-shift for King and Parker, too: In the promotional interviews for the first season, both seemed keen to draw a line under Cattrall’s association with the franchise going forward. Last year, Parker told The Hollywood Reporter that Cattrall was not asked to be on And Just Like That… because “it no longer felt comfortable” following a string of negative comments she had made about her in the press and on social media. “There just isn’t anyone else who’s ever talked about me this way,” she said. 

After the first season of AJLT, it felt like fans had come to terms with the fact that a return for Cattrall was never going to happen. So why the sudden change? In an interview with People, King said he “doesn’t know” why Cattrall decided to return. Rather than the obvious motivation — a number of zeros on a financial offer she simply couldn’t refuse — he instead suggested that fans might have “manifested” the role reprisal. There is clearly an element of giving the people what they want here, but it also seems like HBO has finally learned that there is no point in resisting the reality that this off-screen feud is now central to And Just Like That… In fact, watching the show navigate it — and endlessly hoping for a resolution — is now a key part of its allure to people like me, who grew up watching these four besties sip cosmos and talk about their vaginas over expensive salads.

I wonder why SJP vs. Cattrall has become such a box-office feud? An obvious answer is that our misogynistic culture often tries to pit women against each other, from Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, to Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez, Madonna and Lady Gaga, or the vast swathes of reality TV which centers on turning woman-on-woman conflict into entertainment. 

There is undoubtedly some of that going on here, particularly given that SATC has never been a conflict-driven franchise. But this real-life drama reminds me more closely of Ryan Murphy’s Feud — a six-part series exploring the iconic Hollywood rivalry between Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange) and Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon). Both explore a feud that stems from genuine personal dislike, for an audience of predominantly women and gay men. (Cattrall announced her cameo on Instagram in a typically tongue-and-cheek way, with the caption: “Happy Pride Month”).

Part of what makes this feud captivating is the tantalizing lack of information about it. There is also a huge disparity in recollection, depending who you ask. Parker has said very few things about Cattrall publicly and has always seemed mystified by it. “It’s the weirdest thing, to be told we’re in a catfight,” she told The New Yorker just last week. “I would never speak poorly about Kim. I just wouldn’t.” (It’s worth noting that many of Parker’s co-stars have spoken out in her favor).

On the other hand, Cattrall’s tone has been very different. She was open about money being her motivator for moving on from the TV show in 2004 and, in an interview with Piers Morgan, she claimed SJP could have been “nicer” to her. She has also said she was “bullied” for not wanting to do a third movie. Things seemed to really take a nosedive when Parker sent public condolences to Cattrall following the sudden death of her brother in 2018. She responded by saying that Parker’s “continual reaching out” was “a painful reminder of how cruel you really were then and now,” adding, “Let me make this VERY clear. You are not my family. You are not my friend. So, I’m writing to tell you one last time to stop exploiting our tragedy in order to restore your ‘nice girl’ persona.” Ouch.

In a 2019 interview with The Guardian, whose cheeky headline went predictably viral, Cattrall said of her brother’s tragic death, “I don’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where I’m not enjoying myself. I want to choose who I spend time with personally and professionally. It’s my life.”

Despite the very Real Housewives energy of this all playing out in the press and on social media, the specifics of the beef between these two are few and far between. It has been alleged that Cattrall, unlike Cynthia Nixon and Kristen Davis, always struggled with Parker being the star of the show and wanted more storylines for Samantha. In James Andrew Miller’s 2021 book about the history of HBO, Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, sources revealed that the origin of the beef centered on Cattrall wanting to be paid the same as Parker, and also that Parker had created a toxic work environment by befriending the other leads and icing out Cattrall, as reported in The Daily Beast.

“What happened was it became Mean Girls and whatever Kim did or didn’t do, the result was she was ostracized,” former HBO chairman Chris Albrecht, who has been accused of abuse in the past, says in the book. “I’m not saying it wasn’t justified, but it gets tricky when you have an actor who is also a producer. As an executive producer, SJ should have figured out how to not let that happen. But as an actress, she ended up letting it happen.”

While Parker was the highest-paid on the show, as its lead and executive producer, Albrecht says that Cattrall’s Samantha was the one “everybody was talking about.” 

“Whether there was jealousy toward Kim about that, or Kim wasn’t handling it well, depends on who you listen to,” he says in the book. “Then Kim wanted more, and I think she got more than the other girls.”

But again, there is no definitive proof to give fans concrete answers. In a sense, it’s the opposite of what we’re accustomed to in today’s culture, where reality TV cameras, or social media “receipts,” give us a 360-degree view on a conflict and allow us, the audience, to be the definitive judge of who is right and wrong. It’s how much we don’t know that makes this feud so alluring. In an era of overexposure, the mystery feels old-school.

Speaking of the Real Housewives, there has always been considerable crossover between the franchise’s New York show and Sex and the City. A character on SATC was reportedly based on RHONY’s Dorinda Medley, former Housewife Carole Radziwill has been frequently described as the “real-life Carrie Bradshaw,” and SATC author Candace Bushnell has made frequent cameos on the Bravo reality show. Now, as Bradshaw’s social circle gets much more diverse, RHONY is relaunching itself with an entirely new, multicultural cast in response to the recent reckoning with race and social justice issues at Bravo.

I wonder, then, whether part of what makes this feud so satisfying is that it doesn’t have much “discourse” attached to it. In terms of many of the celebrity scandals we see today, it doesn’t carry any social baggage. At its heart seems to be two women who have never managed to get on and, rather than keeping their distance, have been forced to navigate that in the public eye for 25 years because of work and cultural association. It is refreshing in its simplicity, but also in the fact that fans don’t feel the need to come down strongly on one side or the other. For the most part, we’re happy to stan them both. It’s very low-stakes.

I’m glad that HBO has decided to lean into the feud as a subplot by asking Cattrall to return. While Season One alluded to a feud between Jones and her one-time besties, it’s a much funnier choice to make out these characters are friends while knowing how much they reportedly dislike each other IRL. It’s a choice that suggests that the show is finally “in on the joke” and ready to have fun with it. Filmed in secret and virtual isolation, Cattrall’s return is already a high-camp spectacle I can’t wait to watch. Like the best stories, this latest twist just prompts more questions: Who picked up the phone first? What were Cattrall’s demands? And most importantly: Does this open the door for the return of everyone’s favorite sex-positive PR maven?

I hope so, because it doesn’t feel like this story is fully over yet. We might not get the Chicago moment we want, where Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly put their differences aside to perform a sell-out show and rake in the dough, or when Katy Perry and Taylor Swift finally hugged it out in that dreadful music video dressed as fast food. But the showrunners of AJLT seem to have realized that it’s better to have Cattrall in the fold and give fans a morsel of what they want, rather than have her absence as an elephant in the room, trashing the show from the outside. Even cynically, her silence is probably worth whatever extortionate fee they ended up paying her for one scene.

Those making the show might not like it, but the off-screen drama surrounding Samantha is a big reason why fans are still tuning in, particularly now that we know we’ll get to see a glimpse of her soon. This historic battle — and the fanciful hope that a ceasefire might be called, which will somehow return this franchise to its heyday — is a central part of why so many people still can’t quite let go of Carrie Bradshaw’s world. 

From Rolling Stone US.