Sarah Jessica Parker is tough. We know this from the hours she spends filming And Just Like That in Carrie’s famous stilettos. Anyone that can handle that much tendon strain for that many hours could probably survive a Bear Grylls expedition.
But even we were shocked when the Sex And The City reboot writers revealed that SJP had actually chugged litres of fake vomit to get a realistic shot of Carrie throwing up in episode seven. Isn’t acting meant to be glamorous?
For context, Carrie returned to dating after signing up to a singles app and agrees to have dinner with a 53-year-old fellow widower called Peter. Things get boozy fast and before you know it the pair are hurling up their meal in an alley way. Lovely.
But it turns out, fake throwing up isn’t that simple. ‘The most challenging, complicated, scene was the vomiting,’ said executive producer and writer Michael Patrick Kind on And Just Like That…The Writers Room Podcast{
‘We thought they needed to have [vomit] rigs on them,’ he explained. ‘[This] was a tube that went up alongside their mouth and was connected to a long tube that went under her dress or under his [Jon Tenney’s] pant and down the street to two special effects guys that would then launch pumps of vomit. Then, they would try and turn their faces away from the camera so the vomit would be projectile.’
The thought of gallons of fake vomit gushing along a plastic tube and shooting out of the side of your mouth is truly disgusting. But what’s even more horrifying is that it didn’t actually work and, rather than deal with the logistical puke nightmare for a moment longer, SJP just drank it. Wow - and also - EW. Someone get this woman on I'm A Celeb.
‘The FX guys got fired,’ Kind said. ‘They kept trying to tape these plastic tubes to Sarah Jessica and Jon’s face and finally Sarah Jessica said: “fill up a litre bottle with fake vomit right now and take the tapes off, take everything away.” She chugged a two-litre thing of vomit and did it herself.
‘It was crazy. What you’re seeing, there’s no special effects… She unloads one whole chamber of vomit, and you think that’s it, and then it’s like she has another secret chamber. That’s her New York City ballet training. Her diaphragm is so strong.’
SJP's impressive physique aside, couldn't Carrie have had a nice, normal dinner for once? She's been through a lot lately and, surely, she deserved an uneventful dinner?
Not according to the writers. ‘What the story wanted was something that went from incredibly sad to incredibly outrageously gross,’ said Kind. ‘The only way we wanted Carrie Bradshaw on a date was for it to be a complete disaster.’