Sarah Jessica Parker Said a "Very Big Movie Star" Was Inappropriate with Her on Set

In a wide-ranging interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Sarah Jessica Parker opened up about an uncomfortable experience with an actor on set.

The ordeal in question went beyond a simple clash of personalities. Parker said her co-star "was behaving, not only inappropriately, but perhaps even I would say, they weren’t living up to contractual obligations as well."

Though the actress has been a mainstay in the industry for decades, it wasn’t until “six or eight months ago” that she began to understand how her experience aligned with the #MeToo movement. “I started recognizing countless experiences of men behaving poorly, inappropriately, and all the ways that I had made it possible to keep coming to work or to remain on set, or to simply ... just push it down, push it away, find a little space for it and move on,” she said.

“I didn't feel entirely in a position — no matter what my role was on set — I didn't feel as powerful as the man who was behaving inappropriately, which ... strikes me as just stunning to say out loud, because there were plenty of occasions where it was happening and I was in a different position and I was as powerful. I mean, I had every right to say, ‘This is inappropriate.’ I could have felt safe in going to a superior.”

In fact, the situation with the aforementioned co-star marks the only time Parker asked her agent to step in.

“I felt I was no longer able to convey how uncomfortable this was making me, how inappropriate it was," she said. However, "within hours" of the intervention, "everything had changed."

“[My agent] said to them, ‘If this continues, I have sent her a ticket, a one-way ticket out of this city’ — where I was shooting — ‘and she will not be returning.’”

Though she didn’t name names, the Sex and the City alum described her “inappropriate” co-star as “a very big movie star.”

"The nature of the person who I felt was really the instigator, this was a grown man, a very big movie star and, you know, he was baked, meaning his personality, it was cooked,” she continued. “He was a formed person and that wasn’t going to change. But I felt certainly better and safer, like I could finish what I had agreed to do."

“It wasn’t perfectly pleasant,” she said of her dealings with her co-star following her agent’s mediation, “but I didn’t have to be coy any longer, and I didn’t have to dread a potential conversation. I didn’t have to listen to jokes about me, or my figure, or what people thought they could talk me into doing … All these men. All these men. That stopped.”