Life may imitate art for “Sex and the City” star Kristin Davis: She is thinking of adopting a child, just as her character, Charlotte York Goldenblatt, does in the much-ballyhooed movie version of the hit television show.
“I do definitely think about it,” Davis told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Wednesday during a promotional appearance for the movie, which had its New York premiere Tuesday. “So many people have talked to me, and I have friends who have adopted, and because my character adopts in the film — I’ve learned a lot, and I think it’s a beautiful, wonderful thing to do, but I want to make sure that I’m ready before I do it.”
Charlotte is the idealist and the “good girl” (although that’s a relative term in the context of the show) of the “Sex in the City” cast. In the six years that the show ran on HBO, things rarely worked out for Charlotte the way she hoped. She had dreamed of having a baby, and in the movie, after she and her husband adopt a Chinese girl, Lily, she learns that she is pregnant. Naturally, she has a hard time dealing with so much fulfillment after all her disappointments.
“Charlotte went through so much in the show and she almost never got what she wanted,” Davis said. “So she’s not used to things going well, and then things don’t necessarily go well for her friends, which then gives her even more of a feeling of ‘Why do I deserve this? I’m not sure I deserve this.’ She’s a little neurotic, so it makes perfect sense that she’d be worried.”
A happy reunion
“Sex in the City” ended its run in 2004, and not just its fans were sad to see it go.
“I felt like we were doing the right thing, even though I didn’t want to do it,” Davis said of the series ending. “People would come up and cry, and I felt sad, too. You’re thinking like, nothing will ever be like this again. That’s what was so incredible about getting to come back together. Nothing is like our show and our movie, so we’re very lucky.”
Davis said that the women in the movie have matured, as they would have over four years in real life.
“The nice thing about our show is we were always following these women through their lives, and we never pretended to be younger, we never pretended to be not dealing with the issues that you deal with as you get older,” the actress told Vieira. “So all of us have found our own way of dealing with that, and we’re at different places in our relationships. But it is a little more grown-up, I think, just because of the nature of getting older and the ideas and issues you’re dealing with.”
Rehab at 22
Davis has grown up a lot herself. She started drinking heavily as a teenager, and recently revealed that she thought that alcohol would kill her before she turned 30. She has said that her love of acting helped save her. Alcohol was interfering with her career, and she decided she could have one or the other, but not both. She went into rehab at the age of 22 and has been sober ever since, although she has been quoted as saying, “I miss it. You don’t go to rehab and then suddenly it goes away.”
Single at the age of 43, she’s dated a succession of actors, including Alec Baldwin, Jeff Goldblum and Steve Martin. She told Vieira that she recently built a “green” house in Los Angeles, complete with solar panels. She’s also traveled extensively in Africa on behalf of Oxfam, the famine-relief organization. “I really enjoyed that work,” she said.
“Sex in the City” had already had premieres in several European cities, including London and Berlin, but Tuesday’s New York debut was the one the cast members were most nervous about, Davis said. The show is set in New York, and that’s where its most fervent — and most critical — fans are.
“We were most worried about New York,” Davis said of her fellow cast members. “We were all e-mailing all day about our nervous stomachs.”
The movie opens nationally on Friday.