At this weekend’s GLAAD Media Awards, Michael Patrick King at first played coy when we asked about Liza Minnelli singing “Single Ladies” in Sex and the City 2. “If Liza sang the Beyoncé song, I think it would be the Liza song,” he said. But then he opened up. “You won’t be disappointed. You can’t believe how good she is,” he added. “Yeah, we did it. We did it up for her.” (King also confirmed that our favorite new character introduced in the first movie, Gidget the humping dog, reprises her role in the sequel. “How could you have Sex and the City 2 without a dog that humps?” he said.) When presenting Cynthia Nixon with a GLAAD award, King revealed that in her role as Miranda Hobbs, Nixon has been permanently banned from eating on the set.
“The fact is, there’s only one thing I avoided having Cynthia do on all the years of Sex and the City, and that was to eat on-camera,” he told the crowd. “I discovered early in the first season when I wrote that Miranda eats in a coffee shop, Cynthia would EAT in the coffee shop. I mean, chew and bite and gusto and bite and this,” he declared, leaning into the microphone and making chopping noises with his teeth.
“I mean, there were times you couldn’t even hear the other girls’ lines. And it totally creeped me out; it was like, why is she doing that? How do I get around it?” he continued. “In editing, I’d be saying, ‘Is there a cut with her where you DON’T see the steak in her mouth?’ Is there a different take?’” Apparently he wasn’t joking. “Seriously, all the girls would get to pick what they wanted in the coffee-shop scenes, and Kristin and SJ would pick salads, and Kim would pick blueberries, and Cynthia, I’d look over and she’d be eating a cheeseburger,” he said. “Like, eight cheeseburgers because you’d have to keep going and going and going again. And every time a new one arrived, she was even more delighted than the last.”
See more from the GLAAD Media Awards in the Party Lines slideshow.
