Sarah Jessica Parker Never Filmed Nude Scenes for ‘Sex and the City’ Because She Wasn’t “Comfortable”: “It Wasn’t a Morality Thing”

Sarah Jessica Parker bared it all playing sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, but she still kept her role quite buttoned up, even all these years later in the revival series And Just Like That.

Speaking to Howard Stern yesterday (June 29) on SiriusXM’s Howard Stern Show, Parker explained that she was “concerned” about having to film nude scenes for the show when she received the pilot script.

“I thought the script was really interesting, and really exciting, and different, and fresh, and I’d never seen anything like that,” she said. “The only thing I said to [show creator Darren Star] that I was concerned about was that I just didn’t feel comfortable doing nudity.”

She continued, “I suspected that if it wasn’t in the pilot, it would be a part of a series.”

Star told Parker he wrote the role “with [her] in mind,” and promised she didn’t have to do nudity on the show if she was not comfortable, she recalled. “He said, ‘Don’t do it then… we’ll have other actors, if they feel comfortable doing it, they’ll do it, but you do not have to.'”

The actress went on to portray one of the most iconic characters on television for six seasons without appearing nude once. Sex and the City later spawned three movies and a revival series that has entered its second season.

“I think I just never felt comfortable exposing myself that way,” Parker explained. “I never had any judgments about anybody else doing it, it wasn’t like a morality thing… I was shy.”

The actress has previously spoken about having a no nudity clause in her contracts, a stance she has maintained for much of her decades-long career. “There was so much pressure for me to take my clothes off,” she recalled of her early career in a 2018 interview with People.

“I’ve always had one, and it’s apropos of absolutely nothing,” Parker told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, when she was starring in the HBO drama Divorce. “Some people have a perks list and they are legendary. They have to have white candles in their room. I don’t have a crazy list like that. I’ve just always had [a no-nudity clause].”

However, the actress has always maintained she has no issue with actors who do appear nude in projects, including her own Sex and the City co-stars. “I think it’s fantastic that people feel comfortable doing it. It’s not some kind of principled position or religious or ideological on my part,” she told THR.

You can catch more of Carrie Bradshaw’s fully clothed antics on And Just Like That, which airs on Thursdays on Max.