Sarah Jessica Parker has a laugh with new TV show Divorce
“It’s funny, because on Sex And The City, I was so careful about using the F word,” reveals the actress, who played columnist Carrie Bradshaw in the seminal show about four single friends living in New York.
Written by Irish actress/screenwriter Sharon Horgan, Divorce marks Parker’s first return to HBO since the Sex And The City ended after six series in 2004 (two movies followed in 2008 and 2010).
It depicts the frustrating, devastating, complicated and seemingly never-ending process of unwinding a marriage. Conscious uncoupling it ain’t.
Parker, who also serves as executive producer on the show, had been looking for something in this vein for a few years.
“There had been lots of ideas,” she admits, including one that was potentially going to be titled The Affair.
“I knew of a story of a couple who were having an affair, and this affair was enduring many, many years and they were both happily married people,” explains the 51-year-old. “This affair was like an alternate universe, but it wasn’t hurting anybody. I was so curious because I didn’t think it was unique.”
Parker and Alison Benson, her partner at production company Pretty Matches, were forced to change tack though when another show with that very same title, starring Dominic West and Ruth Wilson, was green-lit.
But their determination to find a project that examined marriage did not wane.
“I hadn’t seen for a long time a portrait of a middle-class marriage, a marriage inhabited by people we all see on the train, in the car next to us or at a school event,” continues Parker, who has three children - James, 13 and seven-year-old twins Marion and Tabitha - with her husband of 19 years, Matthew Broderick.
“What does that look like today? How often have you gone back to try and salvage a marriage? How does it look from the outside, and what do your friends think of your spouse? How do you function, who’s the breadwinner and how do the partner’s disappointments affect you? Not only in terms of sympathies, but how do you see that other person?” muses the actress.
Given that so many marriages end in divorce now, it would be easy to suggest it’s the norm. But as Parker points out: “For the people it’s happening to, it’s not ordinary - unless you’re a serial divorcee. It is monumental, and if there are children involved, I imagine you feel undone.”
In the opening episode of Divorce, a disastrous evening at a friend’s 50th birthday party provokes Frances to reassess her marriage to Robert, played by Sideways star Thomas Haden Church.
Deciding she needs a clean break and a fresh start, Frances tells her husband they need to part ways, prompting Robert to ask: “When did it start going off the tracks in your mind?”
“Well, perhaps when you grew the moustache,” Frances confesses, in a moment that perfectly sums up the show’s tone.
The subject matter might not scream light relief, but the actress knew that “if we wanted to do it in a half-hour format, it had to be funny somehow”.
For that reason, they signed up Horgan, co-creator and star of Channel 4’s brilliant comedy Catastrophe, as creator and writer.
“And also Paul Simms [who wrote for The Larry Sanders Show], who I’d admired for so long,” adds Parker.
Parker says she’s keen to explore characters “least like me or Carrie”.
“That’s what’s good for me, and makes me sick to my stomach with fear, excitement and worry, but it’s what I think is necessary,” she adds.
She isn’t opposed to returning to Sex And The City again, however, to see how Carrie, Mr Big and the girls are getting along.
“I don’t think any of us have said no. I don’t know whether it’d be a series or a movie, that remains an open question and discussion that will continue,” says Parker. “I think that’s always a possibility, definitely.”
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