There were a lot of striking aspects to Miranda's kitchen tryst with Che in episode six of And Just Like That. She was cheating on her husband Steve, they were doing it in Carrie’s apartment, Carrie was watching it all happen while simultaneously weeing the bed (post hip surgery).
But the aspect that really cut through the chaos was the intensity and volume of Miranda’s moans. They echoed around Carrie’s brownstone apartment with enough reverberation to wake a neighbourhood. Che even had to cover Miranda’s mouth to muffle the noise of their encounter.
Viewers were thrilled and horrified by the scene in equal measure, with Miranda’s orgasm face quickly becoming a viral meme. ‘Me flirting,’ wrote one viewer next to a grab of the lawyer in the throes of passion, ‘My mum is re-telling yet another unscientific covid anecdote,’ wrote author Raven Smith next to the same grab of Miranda with her mouth covered.
Like fight scenes, on-screen sex is often choreographed and rehearsed until the final version is captured and edited. So, the big question here is, why was Miranda’s orgasm portrayed as that intense? Was Che just really meant to know what she was doing?
Writer, director and executive producer Michael Patrick Kind explained on the show’s accompanying podcast And Just Like That…The Writers Room that the deep moans were, simply, Cynthia Nixon’s first instinct when performing the encounter.
He explained: ‘I’m gonna call it Miranda’s palaeolithic orgasm, this like giant noise coming out of her, which was Cynthia’s first instinct. And Gillian Robespierre, who was directing, was like: what’s happening? Should it be smaller? And I was like: I think that’s Cynthia’s instinct.
‘What I started to like about it was that it was the birth of something. It felt like labour pains and birth rather than titillating… There are versions where she goes "ah" and I was like how are we going to jumpstart this into comedy?’ So, instead they opted instead for earth-shaking moans.
And, you know what, fair enough. Earlier in the series Miranda confesses that she and Steve haven’t had sex in years. After a dry spell that long, who knows how you’d react?
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