“And Just Like That” showrunner Michael Patrick King told John Corbett he had to lose weight before shooting Aidan’s return on Max’s “Sex and the City” spin-off’s second season.
King says it wasn’t about aesthetics, per se, but about story and part of a makeover to make his return for the show make sense.
“We cut his hair we took the turquoise jewelry away, we told him he had to be rock-hard when he came back,” King said on the “And Just Like That… The Writers Room” podcast this week.
And what was Corbett’s response?
“He was eating fried chicken when I told him,” King recalled, “and he dropped the fried chicken on the plate and fell down in the booth that we were sitting in and said, ‘I knew I was a fatty.’ And then he came back rock-hard with short hair.”
Viewers who watched the episode may have caught a line by Aidan that may have been a gesture to King’s demand. Just after reuniting, Aidan tells Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie after she marvels at how much he hadn’t changed physically since she last saw him nearly two decades ago, “I lost 40 pounds since I emailed you last week.” That rings differently now that we know about King’s request.
King went on to explain why Aidan’s appearance was so important for the storyline. “If we’re bringing somebody back, we have to find some way to bring them back in a new way,” he explained.
“So here we are now, bringing Aiden back again,” King continued, “and we have tricks up our sleeves as to how he is new and what we can actually do with the storyline considering — and it’s a very big consider — all the water under the bridge, all the pain they’ve already been through, how much Carrie has hurt him in the past — according to fan boards, right? — and now twice and how badly he took the breakup. So in order to wrestle all those realities and not throw them away, this would be the emotional equivalent of saying you we have to do something new with this dynamic that we haven’t done before.”
Parker, who is not only a star on the show but one of its executive producers, found out about Aidan’s return from King during a pre-production meeting.
“I tend to trust Michael, almost implicitly, about his instincts,” Parker previously told TheWrap. “I could easily recognize and understand that the Carrie-Aidan relationship is worthy of revisiting and that they might find one another again, given that Carrie is now single and that relationship was important and probably ended not in an ideal way.”
This would be the third time Corbett reprised the role of Aidan in the “Sex and the City” universe. His original storyline extended over season 3 and 4 of the original series. He would later return in Season 6. His last appearance was in the movie “Sex and the City 2” when they ran into each other in Abu Dhabi, went out to dinner and shared a kiss. Not a good thing as they were both married at the time.
Now both single, this new iteration of their relationship unfurls on “And Just Like That” season 2 with new episodes every Thursday on Max.
