Over the years, people have hunted John Corbett down the streets, grocery stores, and coffee shops to pledge allegiance. “every day [expletive] People I meet just say, ‘I was Team Aidan! ’ just say. ‘ he said. He believes those people are lying.
“People don’t want to hurt my feelings,” he said. “They really care about me.”
With brief cameos in two seasons of Sex and the City and a subsequent improvisational Arabian fantasy, Sex and the City 2, Corbett, 62, is a burly cabinetmaker and on・Played Aidan Shaw, who is active both off and off. She’s off again, off again, and still pretty much off, she’s engaged to Carrie Bradshaw’s lover, played by Sarah Jessica Parker.
“He was as warm and masculine, classic American as his furniture,” Carey says of Aidan in his narration.
A character designed to contrast Chris Noth’s taciturn Mr. Big, originally scheduled for just three episodes, Aidan, like many classic American pieces of furniture, is taciturn and tough. rice field. He didn’t allow Carrie to smoke for her. He neglected her interests. He punished her when she cheated on him. Dominant, judgmental, manipulative – who would want a bedroom like that?
Carrie, apparently.because as a trailer Corbett’s Aidan will return for the second season of the wealthy ‘Sex and the City’ revival, ‘And Just Like That…’, which premieres on Max on Thursday. And this time, when people go after him to declare their allegiance to Aidan, Corbett thinks they might be for real.
“Fans who didn’t like Aidan — and I know exactly why they didn’t, Aidan was wrong for her — it won’t happen.” [expletive] Please help those people,” he said.
Corbett spoke by phone late last month from his home in a quiet town about three hours north of Los Angeles. In reality, it was the “wife’s” phone. His wife was actress and model Bo Derek. Corbett’s phone was not working. A request for a video interview was denied.
“I can’t be myself because I’m performing,” he said. “More than an hour is a long time to get your stomach back on track.”
This suggests that Corbett, who became an actor belatedly and more or less accidentally, has mixed feelings about acting, even as he maintains a stance of abstaining from his own career. he said he does. Talking to him is not only about his shirttail-out, profane intimacy, but also a deep ambivalence about his vocation, his craft, and the shows that made him famous.
Corbett grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia with his mother. After his high school graduation, he moved to Southern California to live near his father, a welder, and got a job in a steel mill. When he was 22, an injury left him out and he enrolled in a community college, mostly bored. However, about a month later, he met some men in the cafeteria and was invited to an impromptu class.
“I was the clown in the class, the guy who always made my friends laugh,” he said. “I saw 30 people like me there.” That same day, he dropped another class and re-enrolled as a theater student. He took up swordsmanship. He learned ballet. He never felt that same excitement, that same freedom again.
“It’s like a drug,” he said. “You are chasing first heights.”
His transition to professional acting was even more erratic. He posed for cheesy mugshots, kneaded a résumé full of fake credits, made a living as a hairdresser, failed nearly every audition that came his way, his hands trembling, his scripts shaking. . He had his two goals. He wants to be on TV and he wants to be famous.
In 1990, he was cast as a gentle, groovy Alaskan radio DJ in the CBS comedy Northern Exposure. “Northern Exposure” ran for five seasons and 110 episodes. It didn’t cost much. But it gives him his first bittersweet taste as a celebrity, and while fans love him, it’s not so much their acting skills that they love him, but rather his rumbling, sleepy voice. She told me that she had a big smile and that she was 6ft 5in.
“I was a burly man and women were a big deal,” he said. “I don’t think anyone ever came up to me and said, ‘I think you’re a good actor.'”
It turned out that he had the type, handsome, delicate, and not at all henbo. And in the years after “Northern Exposure,” he didn’t fight it. “You have to go where the money is, don’t you?” he said. Funding at the time came mainly from TV movies, which he said were “not that great.”
However, he had some standards. Then, in 2000, when he was offered his first appearance in Season 3 of Sex and the City, he turned it down. He considered himself more than just a guest star. But showrunner Michael Patrick King, now the creator of “And Just Like That…,” sensed that Corbett would make up for the love and warmth North’s Big lacked, and decided otherwise. I tried to persuade him.
“There are very few actors who are relaxed and have strong sex appeal,” King said in an interview. “He also has that very low confidence vibration that some of the great male movie stars have.”
Corbett didn’t have HBO, so he sent me the episode on VHS. He observed them and again no. (For one thing, the script called for nudity, so “And my sweet little mum saw everything I did.”) For the purpose, I agreed to meet with Parker and King. They met at an apartment in King’s West Village.
“I fell in love with those two cats,” Corbett recalls. “After that time was over, I wanted to be a little closer to them.”
Parker, too, recalled a direct bond. “I opened the door for him,” she said in her recent phone interview. “He made a kind of brave, old-fashioned bow. I don’t remember the conversation except that it was really pleasant and happy.”
Once he was on set, she found the camera only amplified its charm. “It’s like he wrapped his arm around the camera and let it melt into you,” she says. “He absorbed it.”
Episode 3 turned into episode 4. Then five. Then further. When Carrie and Aidan broke up at the end of season 3, fans sent HBO popsicle stick furniture and demanded that they bring Corbett back, and he did.
he had what he wanted. He was on TV. he was famous But the more intense fame he experienced with “Northern Exposure” changed his life, and he said, “It wasn’t quite the way I wanted it to be, but it worked smart.”
There was such a strong connection between Corbett and the role that it struggled to be seen in any other way. He recalled being turned down for other roles he wanted, saying it was too distracting. His work in “Sex and the City” and in the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, his first work released in 2002, is his type of nice boy. It was affirming and limiting friends. Then he became a wonderful husband. More recently, with projects such as the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” film and its recent spin-off his series, “XO, Kitty” He captivated a new generation of viewers as a lovely dad.
“I made friends with the idea that this is my job,” he said. “When the phone rings and I feel like the money is right, the place is right, the time is right, I’m going to be this guy these people want.”
Colleagues who talk about Corbett tend to associate him with his character. Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of the movie ‘Greek Wedding’, seems to refer to actors and characters alike, saying, ‘He’s a very fun rapcarion and likes to have a good time.’ rice field.
“He’s a big puppy. How can you not love a puppy?” said Toni Collette, co-star of the Showtime series “United States of Tara.”
For Corbett, too, the boundaries are blurry, especially with Aidan. “The lines are blurry because hitting the action board doesn’t change anything,” he says. “I still live the same life.”
In Sex and the City, despite Corbett’s warmth, there was darkness in his life. If fans saw Aidan as pleasant and endearing, the character was critical and angry. (For Corbett, the lines get blurred here, too: “I’m pissed off. I want to send a message.” [expletive] Thread a chair through a plate glass window several times a day. )
So why bring him back? At first, Mr. King did not. Since he was going to kill Big in the first season of “And Just Like That…”, he felt he couldn’t summon Carrie’s other major lover so quickly. In 2021, Corbett told reporters he would be in it too, but it was just a prank. (“John’s antics,” explained King.)
But Corbett wanted to come back. “Especially when it comes to photos taken on the street,” he says. “It makes me a little envious that I wasn’t asked to come back and do a cameo.”
Enough time has passed by season two. King called Corbett and soon found himself back at Silvercup Studios, where the original “Sex and the City” was filmed. He brought me some of the same clothes.
But there were also reportedly differences. While Max only shared a few minutes of Aidan’s screen time, Corbett and Parker said the relationship between Aidan and Carrie has softened and deepened. Corbett argued that Aidan would no longer argue in the same way as Carrie. He can no longer control her.
“He’s really listening to her now,” he said.
Parker agreed on another call. “No fever. It’s not demanding,” she said of the characters’ romance. “There’s a very hot atmosphere between them, but he doesn’t have that sense of urgency.”
So does Team Aidan have legitimacy this time around? Pastor King said: “I didn’t bring Aidan here to fail,” he said.
Corbett apparently wanted Aidan to win, though not in a passionate way. Aidan gave him a career, even if it was narrower than the career he once envisioned. But he accepted it. While he’ll probably never be seen as a full-fledged actor, there are worse things he can do than being a classic American dream ship.
“You’ve given me such a wonderful life. I’ve asked very little in return for all the money I’ve gotten,” he said of his career. And, although not entirely true, she added, “I got everything I wanted in this life.”
