And Just Like That… bosses had ‘beautiful last scene’ in mind for Willie Garson
The actor, who played Stanford Blatch on Sex and the City and the show's reboot, passed away in September.
Words: Alastair James; pictures: Craig Blankenhorn/HBO
The showrunners for Sex and the City and its reboot, And Just Like That… have revealed that they had a “beautiful last scene” in mind for Willie Garson‘s character, Stanford Blatch, before Garson passed away in September.
Garson, who played Carrie Bradshaw’s gay best friend on the hit HBO show passed away after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57.
He was able to film three episodes of And Just Like That… but was absent from the show’s fourth episode with the show. No spoilers here.
“He was supposed to be in all 10 episodes”
Showrunner for both SATC and AJLT, Michael Patrick King, has confirmed in an interview with TVLine that they had an ending in mind for Blatch and, “he was supposed to be in all 10 episodes.”
“We had to put some patch to explain his absence. So I tried to make the lightest thin ice to just skate over,” says King referring to the workaround the show used in the fourth episode.
“There was a beautiful last scene that was going to be between Carrie and Stanford that he wasn’t well enough to do, which explained a little bit more,” King goes on to say. Again, no spoilers.
The show’s writer, Julie Rottenberg, also told TVLine that Garson was ready to film more scenes before becoming too ill to do so.
“We thought we might have more time, and we didn’t, and that is the definition of reality getting in the way of plans. I know he wished he could’ve finished more of the work, and it was so aggressive and happened so fast,” she says.
Another writer, Elisa Zuritsky, chimes in that Garson was sick for “most of the scenes you’ll see in the show”, explaining that producers “had no idea he was sick.”
Continuing she says, “And you can see, as we did, how healthy he looks, and how funny he was. It was as if he was in the prime of his life. So it’s still an unbelievable fact for us that he’s not here to enjoy the moment.”
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