IN CONVERSATION CYNTHIA NIXON

interview by JANA LETONJA

Emmy, Tony and Grammy award winner Cynthia Nixon is best known for her work as Miranda Hobbes in HBO's immensely successful series 'Sex and the City', a role that garnered her the first of her two Emmy Awards. She is currently working on its sequel, 'And Just Like That...', in which she also serves as an Executive Producer, and will return for its third season in 2025. Besides this, Cynthia also stars in HBO's 'The Gilded Age', which will will also return for its third season this year. Outside of acting, she has been a longtime progressive advocate for better funding for public schools, abortion rights, and LGBTQ+ equality.

full look BAD BINCH TONGTONG

You started acting at such a young age. Looking back, how did those early experiences shape your approach to acting today? 

I was very lucky when I started acting, having the chance to work with a lot of really great film directors and theater directors. I worked with Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, Louis Malle, and Miloš Forman. I learned tremendous skills from them. I was not a typical kid actor who was just kind of cute and could cry. I had good training from my mother who had been an actress, and I was distinctive enough that people didn't cast me because I was cute. People cast me because I could act, and so people didn't do all those traps that they do with a lot of kid actors giving them line readings and stuff like that. These wonderful directors treated me like I was an adult actor and gave me that respect, and didn't just try and get a result out of me, but actually taught me to act. That served me very well as I grew up. And, of course, I learned from a lot of the tremendous adult actors and actresses that I worked with, like Blythe Danner, Christine Baranski, Jeremy Irons and Murray Abraham. So many wonderful actors. 

look BAD BINCH TONGTONG
shoes THOM SOLO

Your role as Miranda Hobbs in Sex and the City has become iconic. How has your perception of the character evolved over the years, especially with the return of And Just Like That? 

When we started doing ‘Sex and the City’, I think I was thirty-one, and I felt like I had almost nothing in common with Miranda. She was very single, she had no thought of a long term commitment or children or domestic life in general. I was in a long term relationship, I had a child already, and I was an extremely domestic person. But I have to say, over the years, I became more like Miranda, and the writers started putting more and more of me into her. She became softer and more interior and more domestic. And I think my real self became a bit more feisty and confrontational like Miranda, so I'll always be really grateful to her for that. 

What has, in your opinion, contributed to the massive success of ‘Sex and the City’, which is still very popular to this day? 

I mean, it's everything. The first level of it was the writing. The writing on our show has always been so great, and there was a rule in the writer's room that anything that was happening to one of the characters had to have happened to either a writer or someone the writer directly knew. It couldn't be like my cousin's sister's dentist had this funny thing happen to them. It had to be something that happened to the person writing it or someone that they knew and could ask lots of questions. Even though many outrageous things happened on ‘Sex and the City’ and continue to happen on ‘And Just Like That…’, it was always rooted in reality. Then, of course, I think that actors are all really wonderful. They also made a point of hiring film directors for the show. The look of it is very filmic, the lighting and the camera moves. And, of course, Pat Fields' clothes and now Molly Rodger and Danny Santiago's clothes are so incredible, and New York itself. It was a perfect storm of high quality and being on HBO and being given a lot of creative free rein so that our show was allowed to be distinctive. I think a lot of the trouble with television is it's very flat because when you have commercials and you have to please the sponsors, everything becomes sort of generic and flattened out. And that is one of the beauties of HBO today, but particularly in its heyday they gave the creators a lot of autonomy, and that’s why their shows were so good, but also so specific and distinctive.

dress AISTE HONG
earrings ARA VARTANIAN
bracelet ALEXIS BITTAR

As an executive producer on ‘And Just Like That…’, how do you balance the responsibilities of producing with your work as an actor?

The role of the producer is like the role of a parent. It's a never-ending job, and it requires everything of you. And what's nice is when you're a producer, but not the producer responsible for everything, you can pick and choose the ways in which you can be really valuable. One of the ways that I have really liked to do that as a producer is looking at a lot of the auditions of the actors auditioning for different roles on our show and weighing in on that, because that is something I enjoy and something I think I'm good at.

We'll be seeing you in ‘The Gilded Age’ this summer. What can you tease about it and your character? 

Well, of course, not very much. But as we saw at the end of season two, all of a sudden the tables have turned and my character Ada is now the one controlling the purse strings in the house after a lifetime of being dependent on her far more powerful, domineering sister. We will see the power shift and how both of the sisters wrestle with the new dynamic and fight to be the top dog.

suit and tie KID SUPER
shirt LINDSEY MEDIA
earrings DEL ESTE JEWELRY
rings ARA VARTANIAN

You've taken on a very broad range of roles in both film and television. How do you decide which roles to take on and what draws you to a project? 

Every project is different. It's always a plus for me if it shoots in New York because I live here and I have a family. I consider two things. One is to work with people that I find exciting, whether you're talking about a particularly good script or a wonderful director. And working with people that are great always makes you better and adds dimension to what you already know how to do. The other thing is to play a role that I haven't played before. That's always a challenge. When I was first playing Miranda, I would get offered an endless number of roles that were powerful lawyers. The more dimension and the more colors I get to show as a character is always very appealing to me, but especially if the character has something about it that I've never before been asked to play. That's a big plus. 

shirt BALENCIAGA
pants COMME DES GARCONS
earrings ECLAT BY OUI
necklace SYLVIE MAJEROVA JEWELLERY
shoes VEERAH

In your performance in the ‘Seven Year Disappear’, you played eight different characters. How did you prepare for such a challenging role, and what did you learn from that experience? 

That was one of the great things about doing it, playing these eight different parts. And they were very different from one another, very different ages and accents and genders and classes. They were different from each other in every way. The hardest thing about it was when you're first rehearsing all these eight characters, you haven't figured out who the character is yet. In a play like that, so much is about the contrast between the characters that you can't ease into a character. You have to make very bold choices even if you then throw the choices out and make another choice or refine the choices to make it more specific. At the beginning, you have to be almost cartoonish in the size and difference of all your different characters. That was the hardest thing, to plow ahead with a character making big choices for a character you haven't found yet and not feeling like a total fraud or someone in a cartoon. It was enormously challenging. It's one of my most favorite things I've ever done. 

You've directed multiple stage plays as well, including ‘She Ra Sheeda Speaking’ and ‘Motherstruck’. What's the biggest difference between directing for the stage versus directing for the screen? 

It’s very different. When you're directing for the stage, you're dealing with a much smaller group of people. So much of your responsibilities are about the actors, and you're in a rehearsal room for many hours every day just working intensively. And unless it's a classic play, you're also working on the script. You're working very closely with your designers prior to rehearsal, figuring out what the look of the set and the costumes and the lights are going to be. It is a much longer gestational period, whereas directing for screen, there are many more elements, and it moves much more quickly. You have to be on your toes and you have to be decisive. Luckily, I'm a pretty decisive person, so that was an aspect of it that was easier than I thought it was going to be. 

full look PRADA

suit and shoes MICHAEL KORS
earrings MIANSAI
rings SPINELLI, ALEXIS BITTAR

How do you collaborate with actors and other creatives when directing, and what do you look for in a performance when you're behind the camera?

The most important thing about collaborating with actors is to realize different actors require different things from you. It was easy for me in the beginning to think that all actors were the kind of actor I was. I can never get too much feedback, I love feedback. I love being directed quite intensively. There are a lot of actors that are the opposite, they really want to be able to find it first and then, once they have an idea of what they're doing, is when you come in and tweak. For so many actors, and I'm not this way so I had to learn this, if you give them direction too early, it stops their process, and they feel lost and don't quite know what to do nor do they have a feeling of ownership over their performance. It's like a parent and a child never got the chance to bond. You just have to be careful and watchful and have conversations about what they want from you.

As an advocate for progressive causes such as public school funding, abortion rights, and LGBTQ+ equality, what is your view on what is going on today, and what changes do you hope to see in the next few years? 

With the current situation, it's really a disaster in every way. I don't even know how to answer this question, to be honest. We have a president who's announced that he's going to abolish the Department of Education. He's doing his best to make abortion illegal everywhere, and gay and lesbian people, especially trans people, are very much under attack. I'm a queer person in a marriage with another woman, and I have a trans kid. It's very scary. It's hard to even know what changes I hope to see in the next few years. I hope that we will not lose too much ground, and we will really galvanize ourselves and fight back. There's a witch hunt going on in our country against so many different kinds of people, whether you mean LGBTQ+ people or immigrants, documented and undocumented, or people who are not straight white men. It's such a shame because so much progress was being made. We had so much farther to go, but so much progress happened. So many attempts are now being made to erase all that progress with the idea that our attempts to be treated equally were somehow harming other people, harming white men, and I couldn't disagree with that idea more. 

full look CHRISTIAN DIOR

As a lifelong New Yorker, how has living in the city shaped your career and personal life?

Unfortunately, New York is becoming more and more unaffordable, which is really tough, and it's one of the reasons I'm always supporting different people running for office who are really keyed in to this income inequality and lack of affordability and have really bold ideas to do something about that. That's why I'm supporting Zoran Mamdani for mayor right now and fervently hope that he might win the primary in June. But I love New York. I love how many people there are here. I love being in a city where you walk everywhere and take public transportation, and you're just constantly in public. There are so many places that I go to where you just get in your car and you rarely interact with people you don't know. I love being on a New York City street, I love being in a New York City subway or bus. I just love that mix of people and being able to people watch, and the richness of every kind of cuisine and every culture. 

You've had such a diverse and successful career across different mediums. What do you see as the next challenge or ambition in the industry?

 I'm on these two wonderful shows that I love very much. I love these characters very much. I love our cast and our creative teams and our crews. I hope they'll both go on for a long time to come. I have a play that I'm working on and I hope to be putting up on stage as a director in the next year or two. I hope to be playing more wonderful parts that will lead me in directions that I have not even previously dreamed of.

talent CYNTHIA NIXON
photography TYLER PATRICK KENNY
photography assistant DOLL WILKINS
styling AYUMI PERRY with OPUSBEAUTY
styling assistant MADILYNN STITH
hair DAVEY MATTHEW WITH THE ONLY AGENCY
nails SONYA MEESH
makeup MATIN
studio BLONDE + CO
editor TIMI LETONJA
interview JANA LETONJA
cover design ARTHUR ROELOFFZEN
special thanks to ANN LAWLOR and JULSEYNYC for the great space and CYNTHIA ALTORISO for the great canvas!