“It felt so purposeful” — Sarah Jessica Parker recalls sobbing over harsh criticism of her appearance on Sex and the City

Sarah Jessica Parker will always be linked to the fearless, runway-ready vibe of Sex and the City. Yet beneath all those designer shoes and late-night New York adventures, the actress was quietly wrestling with a very private struggle: a steady stream of harsh, sometimes vicious critiques of her appearance.

In an honest chat on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Sarah Jessica Parker explained how that relentless spotlight during the show's peak left her emotionally shattered.

At sixty, Parker finally admitted that, during her run on the HBO show, she had vastly underestimated the sheer volume of hate about her looks that flooded in, and cruelly, it had nothing to do with how she acted.

“Stuff that I couldn't change and wouldn't change and had never considered changing,” she said. “Even still, no interest in changing it.”

And yet, it was the cold, one-sided nature of the criticism that shook her most — not just the content, but the intent.

“I didn’t feel like it was a conversation,” she continued. “No one would ever say it to my face. They just put it in print, like it’s normal to talk about a person that way.”

She recalled the gut-punch of flipping open a glossy magazine only to find a savage article picking apart her face. To her, it was more than a nasty comment; it felt like a public execution of who she was.

“It was brought to my attention that a magazine said something really mean about who I am, how I look. And it was like a kick in the rubber parts. I was just like, ‘Why is this a problem? … Why do you seem to delight in saying it?’ And I called two of my friends … and I was sobbing because it felt so purposeful.”

Her reaction wasn’t immediate defiance, but pain:

“That was the only time I really cried about it,” she shared. “But it wasn’t just that one comment. It was the build-up — a whole season of it.”

Sarah Jessica Parker's private pain in a pre-social media world

Parker pointed out that back then, celebrities were hit with such razor-sharp scrutiny while having almost no way to fight back or take back the story.

“This was before social media,” she noted. “So I really wasn’t prepared for public commentary.”

Even as the show was rewriting the TV rulebook, its lead lived in a lonely bubble, constantly sliced open and never allowed to speak.

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She honestly thought she carried solid self-esteem, yet that self-belief stumbled in ways she never saw coming.

“You're kind of filleted,” she reflected. “We're better for those kinds of experiences, but not all of us are good at it right away.”

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