Kim Cattrall stars in new HBO show Sensitive Skin
Sex and the City's Samantha to play woman going through a mid-life crisis
Kim Cattrall, best known for her role as Samantha in Sex and the City, returns to TV with a new HBO Canada show, Sensitive Skin.
The Emmy-winning actress , who was raised in Courtenay, B.C., joined Rick Cluff Tuesday morning on CBC Radio's The Early Edition in Vancouver to talk about her new role.
How would you describe Sensitive Skin?
It's a half-hour comedy, accentuation on the word "comedy," about middle-aged women going through a mid-life crisis. But it's much more than that. It's also a love story of sorts. And it's about a 30-year relationship which is unravelling.
Why did you want to make this?
It wasn't just a great part for me, which it is. It was also talking about something that is often ignored, overlooked or unconsciously people are not aware of what's going on — which is this part of your life where things suddenly take on a different kind of meaning.
I mean, you've been the student, you gone to the university.Or you've really dedicated yourself to a job. You've become a wife, a mother. You're a daughter, a sister. But who are you now? You get into your 50s and you think, well, I've achieved a lot of those things but, what if I'd gone left instead of right?
It takes a lot of courage to face your mortality, and I think men will identify with this series.
The thing that I love about Sensitive Skin, and what was so brave about HBO Canada saying yes to it, was that they're not frightened to use comedy in a way to open up that kind of question, "What about me getting older?" The fear.
And that was really what I learned from Sex and the City. They took something like sex, which people have been really frightened about, especially coming out of the AIDS epidemic, and we took it and we made this taboo into something people could talk about because we used humour. …
We have this device in the show, which was there originally in the British production as well, but we've [expanded] on it, which is these delusions…. That actually isn't a woman in the hospital. It's in her imagination. And it's part of her speaking to her saying, "Go out there and get what you want, before it's too late, because time is ticking."
Why did you come home [to Canada] to do it?
I saw what was going on with this character of Davina very much reflected in the cities across Canada, which is this condo glut that's happening. [What] these cities are going through is also a metaphor for what these characters are going through. The cities don't know who they are. They're going through this transition.