Cynthia Nixonhas been acting professionally since she was a pre-teen.
“I had never been to summer camp,” Nixon tellsEntertainment Weekly.
“For me, it was like the best summer camp ever.
Cynthia Nixon in ‘Little Darlings’.courtesy everett
Because I was always too scared to go away to summer camp.
I was an only child, and I was very attached to my mother.
“I was 16 turning 17 when I did that,” she says.
Cynthia Nixon in ‘Amadeus’.Warner Bros.
And they agreed.”
“She was this benevolent godmother in my life,” she admits.
“It was a really off-kilter show,” she explains.
Cynthia Nixon on ‘Murder, She Wrote’.cbs
“It was onHBO.
There weren’t really shows on HBO at that point.The Sopranoshadn’t happened.
“We left the entertainment world and we went into this greater zeitgeist,” she notes.
Cynthia Nixon on ‘Sex and the City’.HBO/courtesy Everett
“That was fun,” Nixon recalls of the latter.
ERwas a more intense experience, playing a woman immobilized by a stroke.
Nixon appeared physically frozen on screen and delivered much of her dialogue in voiceover.
Cynthia Nixon on ‘ER;’ Cynthia Nixon on ‘House’.NBCU (2)
Every day they would not bat an eye and they would seat me.
I would do my best to eat through the little bit of my mouth that there was.
That was the extent of mentioning the Frankenstein makeup.”
Cynthia Nixon in ‘Warm Springs’.HBO/Everett
“It was completely daunting,” Nixon says of playing the iconic First Lady.
“It was a dramatic role.
It was oppositeKenneth Branagh, who was in a whole other stratosphere than I am.
Cynthia Nixon on ‘Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’.NBC
I felt very inadequate to be the Eleanor to his Franklin in particular.
And everybody knows what Eleanor looks like, sounds like, and how she walks.”
But the real gold came in more unreserved moments.
Cynthia Nixon in ‘Sex and the City 2’.Craig Blankenhorn/Warner Bros./courtesy Everett
“She wasn’t making a speech,” Nixon says of a particularly useful tape.
So much of the footage we have of public people is of course them in public.
And so much of what you’re playing is them in private.
Cynthia Nixon on ‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent’.peacock
So, how are they really in private?
It’s entirely different."
“Uta said, ‘Don’t worry.
Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Ehle in ‘A Quiet Passion’.A Quiet Passion/Hurricane Films/Music Box Films
“‘And you’ll find that person inside of you.’
But that was only after trying to shoot in Dubai first.
We can’t call itSex in the City,'“she explains of working out their locations.
Cynthia Nixon on ‘Ratched’.SAEED ADYANI/NETFLIX
“We were like, ‘Okay, well, it’s been nice talking to you.
We’ve got to go find another place now.’
It was surreal being so far away from home.”
Cynthia Nixon and Sara Ramirez on ‘And Just Like That’.Craig Blakenhorn/HBO Max
“But it was fun playing an artist,” she adds.
“Certainly the clothes were great.
I have a lot of them still.
Cynthia Nixon on ‘The Gilded Age’.Barbara Nitke/HBO
And I am now a director myself.”
“It’s great stuff,” she says.
Nixon grew up listening to a record of Harris reading some of Dickinson’s poems and letters.
“I’m a very literary person.
“She’s rhapsodic,” Nixon gushes.
I am a performer definitely, but I’m as much a homebody.”
What is there going to be waiting for me when I get back?'”
That project never came to fruition, but Nixon injected much of her research about Hickok into Gwendolyn.
She adds, “Having two queer women playing these two queer characters was fantastic.”
And I don’t see that.
To try and undo some of that at this later stage of life, it’s awkward.
It’s really awkward.
Wouldn’t there be some growing pains?”
“He wanted her to fall in love with her professor,” she says.
I don’t know why that bothered me, but it really did bother me.
Also, that woman was going to be straight too.
“I was like, ‘Can’t we just start it with her being divorced?'”
“We can see Steve and Miranda co-parenting in a really nice way.
You want to actually go into that and mine that for all it’s worth.”
Ada is meek and gentle in contrast toChristine Baranski’s Agnes Van Rhijn, Ada’s elder sister.
But Miranda is pretty much the antithesis of that.
Could there be a twin brother that we didn’t know?’
I just keep getting a whole lot of ‘no.'”
“But old habits die hard.
Particularly the relationship as it has previously existed is basically from Ada’s birth.
Agnes has always been the big sister.
They’re almost like a mother and daughter.
So, Ada has been emboldened, but I do not think it will come easily to her.”
