In the summer of 2018, you would have had every reason to believe that Cynthia Nixon had happily waved goodbye to her illustrious, three-decade acting career. Throughout the deciding months of New York’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, even as Andrew Cuomo maintained a steady lead over her growing support from progressives, the so-called “Cynthia effect” seemed to signal a future in politics for Nixon that could go well beyond the typical celebrity campaign. Then, as quickly as it seemed to have arrived, her run was over, with Cuomo’s establishment ties and big-league backers proving insurmountable. (For those who opposed her, it goes without saying that the decision hasn’t aged well.) But while Nixon’s political dreams may have been temporarily finished, she lost none of her momentum – she simply channeled it elsewhere.
“I mean, a political campaign does take a lot out of you,” says Nixon, laughing, from her home in Manhattan. “And so I took some time to recover. That was very needed, and very welcome.” Nixon’s recovery period after a year-long slog through the rough-and-tumble of New York politics didn’t last long, however. Within months, she had signed up for a role in Ryan Murphy’s horror series Ratched, playing – in a typically Murphy-esque touch of meta casting – the California governor’s press secretary with political ambitions of her own. And now, in 2022, it feels like Nixon is having one of her busiest years ever: first with the return of her beloved Sex and the City character Miranda Hobbes in the show’s reboot And Just Like That, and then with her role in HBO’s period spectacular The Gilded Age.
Created by Julian Fellowes, the British mastermind behind Downton Abbey, the long-awaited historical drama is set in the grand halls and drawing rooms of 1880s New York society, following the shifting fortunes of the city’s old guard as they reluctantly absorb a nascent class of flashy industrialists. Nixon is Ada Brook, the more kindly sister of Christine Baranski’s snooty socialite Agnes, with the spinsters’ stuffy mansion sitting opposite a palatial townhouse constructed by the newest wealthy family on the block. Enlivened by the arrival of her estranged niece, Marian – played by newcomer Louisa Jacobson, Meryl Streep’s youngest daughter – Nixon plays Ada with warmth and naïveté, even as a steelier sense of resolve bubbles under the surface and eventually emerges as the series progresses.
To step into the world, Nixon began – where else? – by re-reading books by Edith Wharton and Henry James. “I found them very helpful to kind of get the interior life and what the feel of the time was,” she says. Also on hand to help her get into the spirit of the piece was the sheer grandiosity of the project, with budgets generous enough to include multiple historical advisors, lavish costuming, and no-expense-spared, full-scale sets. “It was astonishing,” says Nixon. “I can’t think of another production I’ve been involved in that was so lavish and so large and so sweeping.” She recalls one day of filming a scene in which Ada and Marian visit the original Bloomingdale’s store on the Upper East Side of the 19th century – the exteriors of which were recreated in the upstate town of Troy, New York – as being particularly jaw-dropping. “I only had one day there, and we had all our trucks and trailers parked in this slightly unprepossessing part of town,” Nixon remembers. “I was put in my costume, and I opened the door and there was a town square as far as the eye could see, with a war memorial in the middle, and horses and carriages, and every storefront created to seem like it was 140 years ago. I had never seen anything like it – it was extraordinary.”
While Nixon’s initial enthusiasm for the project lay in the evident charm of her part – “I don’t always get to play these gentle, loving, heart-on-their-sleeve kind of characters, so it was a nice change,” she says – she was also eager for a reunion with Baranski. (The pair first worked together on a Broadway play in 1984, where, despite just a 14-year age gap, Baranski played Nixon’s mother, a fact both find amusing in hindsight.) “I heard a rumour that they were trying to get Christine, so I texted her immediately and said, ‘Is it true? Is it true?’” Nixon recalls. Their existing rapport made establishing a sense of intimacy between the sisters simple. “We always talked about Ada and Agnes as if they were an old married couple with all of those little irritations, and I remember Christine saying that playing a married couple is one of the hardest things to do, because it’s very hard to recreate that with someone you don’t know so well,” says Nixon. “I think we love each other, and we trust each other, and we understand each other, so we had a real head start.”
When it came to Ada alone, though, Nixon notes that her inspiration for the character lay somewhat closer to home – namely, in the form of her late godmother. “She was single and had no children, but she was not a person who felt pity for herself,” Nixon remembers. “I have to say, I really thought about [my godmother] a lot, and her love of young people and her avid interest in everything going on in the world. She had dozens of godchildren, and she populated her life with young people, which I think kept her very young.” Ada has a similar relationship with Marian, and is hopeful that as societal attitudes towards women evolve, her niece will be able to have a better life than her own. “I think Ada is so excited to be able to help guide and shepherd that young woman, in a way no one shepherded her, and so her life kind of fell by the wayside,” says Nixon. “It’s a chance for Ada to vicariously review her own life and how it could have turned out differently.”
Of course, no historical drama is just a historical drama. The tensions that underpin The Gilded Age – in particular, its exploration of the economic inequality that accompanied the rise of the new millionaire class and the poorer communities it exploited – are eerily timely. After all, the show is hardly a museum piece when the millionaires are now billionaires, and the sources of income are no longer railroads or mining, but the data surveillance and worker exploitation that exist in the shadow of Big Tech. Given that some of the core tenets of Nixon’s political platform were tackling income inequality, establishing universal healthcare, and providing support for working-class families, did those themes resonate with her too? “There are so many parallels,” she says. “The crushing poverty, the issues of women fighting to be treated equally, of people of colour and African American people fighting to be treated equally, and immigrants grappling with their place in a new country. I would say we’ve made some progress – although in terms of immigration, I’m not even sure that’s true – but these are definitely themes that are very, very alive today.”
No less political, albeit in an entirely different form, were the circumstances of Nixon’s return to the beloved lawyer Miranda Hobbes in And Just Like That. Conversations around reviving Sex and the City first began during the early months of the pandemic; by January 2021, HBO had ordered a full series, to a rapturous response from the show’s ever-loyal fans. But for Nixon, returning to SATC came with caveats – one of which was that the show would, well, no longer be the show at all. “When we were in discussions about whether to go back, I really wanted to be sure it wasn’t a reboot,” says Nixon, who also ended up directing an episode of the series. “The world is very different now – not just because of Covid, not just because of Trump, not just because of Black Lives Matter, not just because of global warming. We’re absolutely a comedy, but to do a light-hearted show that didn’t acknowledge any of those things would have seemed incredibly tone-deaf. So I’m very proud of it in that sense.”
Unexpectedly, many of the most heated conversations surrounding the new show have centred on Miranda – more specifically, the whirlwind romance she shared with Sara Ramírez’s non-binary comedian and podcast host Che Diaz, her implied alcohol dependence, and the fraying relationship with her husband (and ultimate fan-favourite SATC man, if the online chatter has been anything to go by) Steve Brady, played by David Eigenberg. Given the internet’s fervid interest in the show’s most controversial love triangle since Carrie-Aidan-Big, I feel I almost need to read Nixon her Miranda rights (so to speak) before she goes on record about anything relating to the subject. How closely has she been following the discourse? “I think I’m… fairly aware?” Nixon says, before breaking out into a guilty laugh. “I get a sense by what people ask me about it in interviews, mostly.”
How does she feel about the arguments that Miranda’s character has completely changed? That she’s lost some of the clear-headedness or self-awareness that many associate her with from her original run of the show? “I think that’s a bizarre reaction,” Nixon says, firmly. “First of all, I think Miranda is brave, and I think Miranda is charging forward. She doesn’t know where she’s going exactly, but she knows she has to go somewhere. And I think that’s always been true of Miranda, right? Miranda’s very smart and she’s very tenacious, but the idea that she’s level-headed – she’s never been level-headed! She’s a loose cannon, a very opinionated loose cannon. She’s always been a bull in a china shop and losing her temper and blowing things up then having to backtrack when she calms down. I feel like what Miranda does [on And Just Like That] is incredibly brave. She gives up her very lucrative corporate job and goes back to try and make something more of her life. As Miranda says: We’re not old, we’re 55. I mean, you’re certainly closer to the end than to the beginning. But if you’re not happy with where you are, you still have a lot of time to make a change.”
It’s also hard not to see parallels between the dramatically divisive response the current iteration of the show has received, and the furor back when Sex and the City first premiered. (The social critic Camille Paglia was a fan for its foregrounding of “pro-sex feminism”; Christian lobby groups less so.) Feminist thinkers of all stripes continue to debate its credentials in advancing or setting back conversations around women’s sexuality and financial independence, but what can be said unequivocally is that, even with its blind spots regarding race and gender identity, the show has always been a backdrop for important conversations around women’s progress in contemporary society.
“It’s so funny, when you’ve gotten used to something, it seems tame,” says Nixon. “And we were anything but tame. We got a lot of hate in the first few years, you know, and even beyond that. A lot of [people saying]: Women don’t act like this, this is disgusting. These aren’t real women, these are men in drag. Is this show feminist? Can you be a feminist if you wear high heels? I think that it was new and different, and people didn’t always know what to think, and they didn’t always know if they liked what the original show was saying. But now, of course, it’s part of the culture, it’s enshrined. And so I think people were looking for us to be a little more tame and benign, but that has never been our show. If you think that Sex and the City is a show that’s really about footloose and fancy-free women shopping and having sex, I mean…”
As to the debates that have swirled around her relationships with Steve and Che on the show, Nixon is equally philosophical. “It reminds me very much of Carrie and some of her most seminal moments of being in love with Mr Big and trying to make herself be in love with Aidan, but having an affair,” she says. “Like I was saying before, a feminist show shouldn’t be agitprop, it shouldn’t be propaganda showing women as these sensible, wise, kind, attractive people.” At this, Nixon breaks into a hearty laugh. “First of all, who wants to watch that? I don’t want to watch that. It’s to show women and our struggles and our dreams and our foibles. You don’t always know where you’re going. Those are the people that I’m interested in, not the people who are playing it safe.”
As I remind Nixon, though, there’s a strong contingent of Sex and the City fans who loved the new iteration of the show for all its quirks and, yes, occasionally clunky moments. For those who entered with a different set of expectations, and allowed themselves to be drawn into its often moving meditations on grief, motherhood, and the emotional vagaries of middle age, it proved to be the most profound chapter yet in the lives of the women we’ve grown to know so well over the years. “I feel like people who have been less sanguine about it were really looking for a rehash of the old show,” Nixon says. “If I could do anything differently, I would have made sure we said to people in letters 10 feet tall: This is not Sex and the City. If you’re looking for Sex and the City, you should watch the reruns. This is a new show for this moment, and for the moment in these original characters’ lives.”
It’s clear that Nixon is proud of both The Gilded Age and And Just Like That, and rightly so – across an impressive career, both serve as feathers in the cap of her achievements as an actor. It’s hard not to get the sense, though, that for someone as restless as Nixon is, the question of what comes next is already creeping. It seems that at the moment, her priorities lie mostly in catching up on the time away from her family that the filming of both shows necessitated. As if to confirm that, Nixon’s youngest child – whom she had with her wife, education activist Christine Marinoni, in 2011 – can be heard happily playing in the background throughout our conversation. “My son is very excited today,” she observes at one point. “Hey Max, can you try and yell a little less?”
As to whether she might be drawn back into the political realm, however, Nixon is circumspect. “I mean, I was very politically involved before I ran, and I’m still very politically involved,” she says. “But I really ran because no one else would run against Andrew Cuomo – because he was so famously vindictive that if you opposed him, whatever political career you previously had would be ended. So that’s why I ran. I couldn’t bear to have him run unopposed.”
Despite the circumstances that led to Cuomo eventually resigning in disgrace last year, Nixon isn’t exactly dancing on his grave as a final act of one-upmanship. She did, however, take the opportunity to drop a zinger after he was stripped of his Emmys. “The difference between me and Andrew Cuomo?” Nixon wrote on Twitter. “Neither of us is governor, but I still have my Emmy(s).” As she continues to dominate our TV screens, there may be more still to come.
