Kristin Davis wanted to talk. Last month, she invited PEOPLE to sit down with her for lunch at Soho House in West Hollywood. Tucked into a cozy chair in a corner, she looks out over Los Angeles. Just there, in the distance, she spots a familiar logo: “Oh, look, HBO!” The Sex and the City and …And Just Like That star takes a sip of her decaf latte and makes a confession: “I’m a little nervous!”
Davis has been on television for three decades now, since getting her big break on Melrose Place in 1995. Along the way, she’s never wanted to talk much about her personal life or costars, but, then again, she hadn’t yet had her own podcast.
Davis, who turns 60 later this month, is known for her supporting roles in decade-defining TV shows. But now she’s front and center, leading the iHeartRadio podcast Are You a Charlotte?, where she revisits SATC episode by episode. And this time it’s Davis who’s doing the narrating.
Her latest role as a storyteller has put Davis in a nostalgic mood. Raised in South Carolina, Davis studied acting at Rutgers University and after graduation — and getting sober — quickly nabbed small parts on ER and daytime soaps before her big break on the nighttime one, Melrose Place. Looking out over the city, the mom of two pauses and takes a deep breath: “Well, here’s a story I’ve never told.”
It was almost exactly 30 years ago that Davis was up for the role of Brooke Armstrong on Aaron Spelling’s nighttime soap, starring Heather Locklear, about a group of twentysomething Angelenos all living around a pool.
“I had just opened up a yoga studio; that was my backup plan,” she recalls. Her audition came down to her and two other actors, one of whom now has two Oscars. “Hilary Swank walked out and was like, ‘Oh, I totally blew it.’ ” Davis walked in. “Mr. Spelling was there. He had this huge office, this curvy long couch and fish tanks.” She got the part and was on the show in 1995 and 1996, “but they did not know what to do with me,” she says. “I would get my script, and I would just be like, ‘Oh, Jesus, what am I gonna do this week?’ My character was very conniving!”
She remembers Locklear being “so incredibly nice” and that she “really set an example for how someone handled fame, how to lead a show.” But, Davis remembers, “there was a general vibe on the set, though, that was difficult, about the thinness situation. Every single person was gorgeous and super skinny.” She pauses. “So I was like, ‘This is what I have to do.’ ” She hired a running coach, would do back-to-back 90-minute spin classes. “I’m sure I wasn’t eating. I’d be so lightheaded that I fainted in a parking lot one time. Sometimes I couldn’t remember my name.”
She was on the hottest show in 1995 and Los Angeles was a party town, she remembers. But Davis had already gotten sober. “Oh yeah, I was a weirdo,” she says. “There were like plates of cocaine, and I was like ‘What the f—? Get me out of here.’ It definitely set me apart.” Davis, who has been sober ever since, says she drank for the same reasons she loved acting.
“I started drinking early,” she remembers. “It was freedom. Until it wasn’t. Enough bad things had happened,” she says. “If I hadn’t loved acting, I don’t think I would’ve stopped, because I wouldn’t have had a reason to stop. But for me, type-A me who wanted to be so good at everything to do with my job, that was when I first had the kind of light-bulb moment of, ‘Oh, acting, drinking. They’re not going to go great together.’”
When Sex and the City premiered in 1998, Davis was cast as hopeful romantic Charlotte York, a role that would define her career. The show’s creator and producer, Darren Star, whom Davis knew from Melrose, initially sent her the role of Carrie. “I was like, ‘No way! I cannot play that girl. I have to play this other girl.’ ” It worked out.
She, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kim Cattrall came together for the first time at the table read just before they began filming. “There was a weird alchemy that happens with us and our characters but also with us and each other,” she says. “Chemistry is something you can’t plan on. We were just so excited that the four of us [women] were the cast — that was unheard of, really — and that we were gonna be in Manhattan, filming on the streets.”
Years after the series ended in 2004, a fracture was revealed between Cattrall and her castmates. Asked about the status of their relationship, Davis says, “I haven’t seen her in a very long time. In my mind, we worked together, we did this amazing thing together. I’m doing this podcast to talk about what is different now, what we might have gotten wrong. I want to celebrate her part of the show. Because it’s a huge, huge part. It needs to be celebrated, respected and held up. That is my goal, not to stir up drama. Also, since this show ended and the movies ended, she said she wished we wouldn’t talk about her anymore. I want to honor that.”
When Davis began recording the first episode of her podcast, something happened. In talking about ghosting alongside Sarah Wynter, who guest-starred in the pilot episode of Sex and the City, Davis stepped into Carrie Bradshaw’s shoes and told her own dating-nightmare story about a guy who ghosted her in the ’90s — and still owes her $5,000.
“It was scary,” she says of sharing her experience. “I’m usually very careful and do not talk about my private life, but here I am in this situation where I’ve started a podcast about the themes of our show.” Nixon, for one, is loving it. “It’s wonderful to see her in charge of this new world that she’s creating,” she says. “It’s part of her growing into herself and all her power.”
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