Sarah Jessica Parker Interview

This month's cover girl SJP talks exclusively to Marie Claire

The SATC phenomenon is quite amazing. It's only in retrospect you realise there was a vacuum for the show. Because there had been women on TV, but they just weren't being intimate and sharing. And they were not examining sexual politics. I always think about that now but, at the time, I didn't see it like, 'The time has come.'

The show does receive an adverse reaction from men. I have them stop me and tell me they don't care for it. I had one stop me on the street. He was a very religious man, and he told me how much he didn't like the show. I asked if he'd ever seen it and he said, 'No!' You know, it's a democracy.

I'm not a great flier and I'm about to have to fly a nice amount. I just feel this anxiety as soon as I'm on the aeroplane and, in my head, I'm doing my best to keep it in the air, hold it up myself.

I believe in God, but in my own unconventional way. We're not affiliated with any organisation and I have no religious education of any kind, but I definitely have my own kind of ideas about it.

If you have a child you're improvising with rules all day long and some of them are total lies. If I'm trying to get my five-year-old son, James Wilkie, to take a bath, I resort to things like, 'It's illegal not to.' Or I'll say, 'I'm required by law to put lotion on your rash. I'm sorry.' You do these things.

I've got nowhere near as many pairs of shoes as Carrie. It was very flattering when Manolo Blahnik named a shoe after me. I'm a huge fan so, to this day, I still kind of can't believe it.

Intolerance, small-mindedness and ignorant ideas make me angry, as well as the recent shift to a more base culture. People seem to enjoy vulgarity and that hasn't been good for us.

Graham Norton makes me laugh. I love him. I'm not kidding. I watch him on BBC America every week. He's so fast.

Kristin Davis compared being in SATC to being in The Beatles. She said she was George. I would never have made her George. George is definitely Cynthia [Nixon]. Kristin's Paul. She has the face. I'm John. Kim [Cattrall] is Ringo… she's sparkly, she has that beat. I have to call Kristin about this right now.

This is an edited version of the full interview, which appears in the July 2008 issue of Marie Claire.