Kristin Davis Breaks Down Discussing the Late Willie Garson in the “Sex and the City” Pilot: 'So Young and So Beautiful'

Kristin Davis was moved to tears watching the late Willie Garson in the very first episode of Sex and the City.

On the premiere episode of her new iHeartRadio rewatch podcast Are You a Charlotte?, the actress took deep dive into the iconic HBO show’s 1998 pilot, sharing memories and reactions after watching it for the first time in decades.

Davis, 59, got particularly emotional talking about Garson’s first scene in the series, in which his character, Stanford Blatch, talks relationships with Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw over lunch.

“Oh my God. I forgot Willie,” Davis said of the actor, who died in 2021 at the age of 57. “Oh my God. When Willie comes on the screen — I might cry. I'm sorry.”

Related: Willie Garson's 'Sex and the City' Costars Pay Tribute on What Would Have Been His 59th Birthday

“You know, he's so young, and he's so beautiful. And I really — I'd forgotten, you know?” Davis continued, fighting back tears. “I had to stop when I was watching it. I was like, ‘Oh my God. We were just little, little babies,’ you know? And he's so funny, and their relationship is so great. And they had been friends for so long, so I love it that it's on camera.”

As Davis noted, like their fictional Sex and the City counterparts, Parker and Garson where close friends for more than 30 years. In a 2021 Instagram post, Parker wrote that the “gravity” and “anguish” of Garson’s death from pancreatic cancer had been “unbearable.”

On Are You a Charlotte?, Davis also recalled how Garson helped her get over her nerves during her audition for Sex and the City.

“Willie Garson was there, and I knew Willie already. I had met Willie in Vancouver probably the year before, and I loved him so much. So, thank God he was there because I had to wait for hours before I could go in and read,” she explained. “I’m sitting on a counter at this point, and Willie is sitting up there with me. We’re there for so long that, like, I'd be nervous, and then I’d get unnervous. And then Willie would tell me a funny story, made me laugh, and I’d be unnervous. And then I’d get nervous again.”

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Elsewhere in the podcast, Davis revealed how she really feels about Sex and the City’s first episode, which is famously different from the glossy, fashion-forward romp the show would ultimately evolve into.

“I haven't seen the pilot in probably, I mean, at least 20 years, maybe more because I was never a fan of the pilot,” she admitted.

“I knew in my gut that that the show was, like, a living, breathing thing that we should do and that I should be on it as well as everyone else,” Davis explained. But, she continued, “Part of my response to the pilot back then was that it didn't seem polished. It didn't seem smooth. It seemed kind of choppy and hectic. But I also feel my personal theory on pilots in general is that if they're too good, if the pilot is too formed, the show might not be good.”

“What you want in a pilot is like a spark, like a something, like a fissure, like an energy,” Davis said. “And then the show can run on that, and you can form it into something like clay, then you can form it into something if you have the right creative people and if you have a network who will allow you to form it, which luckily we did in HBO.”

Davis also gave her assessment of her own performance as Charlotte York, the show’s most conservative character. “First of all, I seem like I'm 25 years old,” she said. “And second of all, I seem like I've literally never been to Manhattan. Like, everyone else is so much more sophisticated than me.”

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Davis noted that it was obvious from both the pilot script and the Candace Bushnell book on which it was based that her character would have a very different point of view from the rest of the core cast, played by Parker, Kim Cattrall and Cynthia Nixon.

“It's very clear that I'm on a different trajectory, and you do kind of think like, ‘How did Charlotte get to be friends with these girls?’ ” she said. “I always thought that was weird through the years when people would bring that up to me. Like, ‘Why are you friends with them?’ I'd be like, ‘Why wouldn't I be friends with them?’ Right? They're fascinating.”

“And then to have Charlotte be kind of this, looking for love, you know, naive character, which obviously I knew she was, it is different. It is definitely different,” she added. “But in my gut, I felt like it was really important to have this other character.”

Watching her character try to “fit in” with Carrie, Miranda and Samantha in the pilot, Davis said, was “kind of heartbreaking in a certain way.”

“But, also, that is kind of Charlotte,” she said. “She wants to be loved. She wants to find love. She wants to have love with her girlfriends. She wants to connect.”

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