While Kim Cattrall made it clear she wasn’t going to return to the world of Sex and the City years ago, in a new Variety cover story, she explained why she didn’t reprise her Samantha Jones for the HBO Max follow-up And Just Like That… .

For one thing, the 65-year-old actress said she “was never asked.”

“I made my feelings clear after the possible third movie, so I found out about [the show] like everyone else did — on social media.”

That said, Cattrall says, “It’s a great wisdom to know when enough is enough. I also didn’t want to compromise what the show was to me.”

Kim also revealed that the third Sex and the City film, which she eventually pulled out of, some elements actually hewed fairly closely to the basics of And Just Like That…, including the death of Chris Noth‘s Mr. Big.

However, instead of development for Samantha’s character, one element of the plot that Cattrall objected to was Samantha getting a dirty pic from Brady, the underage son of Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda. Cattrall called that “heartbreaking.”

While Cattrall acknowledges it’s certainly nice that people miss Samantha, “I haven’t deserted anybody,” she insists. “Can you imagine going back to a job you did 25 years ago? And the job didn’t get easier; it got more complicated in the sense of how are you going to progress with these characters? Everything has to grow, or it dies.”

She adds, “I felt that when the series ended, I thought that’s smart. We’re not repeating ourselves. And then the movie to end all the loose ends. And then there’s another movie. And then there’s another movie?”

After 2010’s Sex and the City 2, Kim recalls, “Everything in me went, ‘I’m done.'”

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