The Secret to Kim Cattrall’s ‘And Just Like That’ Return: ‘No Contact With Anybody’

Sex and the City fans rubbed their hands together in glee when Kim Cattrall’s return to And Just Like That was announced last week, either because Samantha was a favorite character or more likely because a favorite feud was about to be reignited. 

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Said feud dates back to at least 2004, a messy affair over money and a general inability to get along. Sarah Jessica Parker denied the feud for years, expressing her love for Cattrall and complaining that the jabronis over on The Sopranos never got asked if they exchanged Christmas presents.

But over time, the bad blood proved to be real after all. In 2017, the Daily Mail reported that Cattrall essentially killed a third Sex and the City movie. (The British tabloid said it was over outrageous contract demands; Cattrall said she simply just refused to do it.) Later that year, Cattrall made it clear that she and the other SATC cast members “were never friends.” And time has not healed these wounds — Cattrall has not proven herself to be a “forgive and forget” kind of woman.

So how do you work Samantha back into the mix with so much animosity in the cast’s past? And Just Like That producers seem to have figured out the perfect solution: Confine Cattrall to the garage where there’s no chance she will interact with Parker and friends. 

And Just Like That cast member Evan Handler confirmed to Deadline that even though Cattrall is bringing closure (we’ll see) to Samantha’s story, the actress didn’t speak to any of her former castmates. In fact, it appears she didn’t speak to anyone at all. According to Handler, Cattrall’s cameo “was shot in the garage somewhere with no contact with anybody, so the only place I have to welcome her is into my living room when it airs on television.”

The Samantha character existed off-screen in And Just Like That’s first season. Others on the show referenced her — in a case of life imitating art, the show explained that she had a falling out with Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw — but Cattrall herself was nowhere to be seen. The Season Two cameo reportedly leaves the door cracked just enough to allow Cattrall to return in case hell gets hit with an unexpected Arctic blast. 

But why did Cattrall come back at all if she wasn’t going to interact with anyone? After all, when Variety asked her about a return to Samantha last year, she replied, “That’s a no. It’s powerful to say no.”

Then again, in the same article, she concluded, “The greatest compliment I could have as an actor is to be missed.”