Kim Cattrall: ‘I’ve had a life’s experience – I want to bring it on board’

‘This could only happen on the radio,” Kim Cattrall says, from her home in Vancouver Island, of her new series Central Intelligence. “It would be much too expensive any other way.” She can say that again; the BBC Radio 4 podcast, with this incongruously glittering cast – Ed Harris also stars – tells the true story of the CIA, from its haphazard beginnings in the wreckage of postwar Europe, to 9/11, to the present day. Cattrall narrates as Eloise Page, nicknamed the “Iron Butterfly”, who became the first female station chief in 1978, but had been embedded in the agency since 1947, before it even had the name (previously, it was called the Central Intelligence Group). “It was a time when women were treated either as a mum, or as a secretary, which is just another kind of mum,” Cattrall says. “That’s why it’s so interesting to come at it from a woman’s point of view. Because Eloise owns this story.”

The last time I met Cattrall was at the apex of Sex and the City in 2002. I don’t think it’s speaking out of turn to say that her Samantha – sexually voracious, devil-may-care, caustically witty, living her best life – was the only thing that made the show anything like what people said it was: iconic, revolutionary. She said back then: “I don’t think there’s ever been a woman who has expressed so much sexual joy [on television] without her being punished. I never tire of women coming up and saying: ‘You’ve affected my life.’” In our interview today she mentions that role in passing, saying that she “tried to bring the truth about being a single woman in New York, the things that people might not know, the things I hadn’t seen before”.

But I’m under instructions not to ask about that era, which is a bit like airbrushing Trotsky out of a photograph, covering as it did a longish (1998 to 2004, plus the films, of course) chunk of her career, and accounting for the most feverish era of her celebrity. Part of the reason, maybe the whole reason, is the rumours of an ongoing feud between Cattrall and her co-star Sarah Jessica Parker. Back in the day, everyone said the whole cast hated each other, which at the time she put down to sexist tittle-tattle. “I mean, The Sopranos has never had any questions asked about whether or not they like each other, because they’re not all women.”

Power play … Kim Cattrall and Seth Numrich in Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old Vic in 2013. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

When the show rebooted in 2021, as the truly woeful And Just Like That …, Cattrall wasn’t in it, of which decision Parker said at the time: “We did not ask her to be part of this because she made it clear that that wasn’t something she wanted to pursue, and it no longer felt comfortable for us, and so it didn’t occur to us.” So, of course, the whole thing was reheated, despite the fact that Cattrall did make a brief cameo for the season two finale in 2023. Journalists still pick it all over in complicated timelines. God, it must be wearing, having your life told and retold as scenes from Mean Girls.

So instead we talk about Central Intelligence. The CIA story is, as she describes, incredibly gripping and “some episodes are absolutely hilarious, it was like the Keystone Cops”. The chaos was unbelievable; dodgy agents lifting millions off the US for made-up information, journalists casually offed for being a nuisance. If America was, for many of these decades, considered the world’s policeman, one is invited to imagine that policeman being perpetually confounded, tricked, wrongfooted and caught with his pants down: he’s way more like a fancy-dress cop on a hen night than an actual policeman. Cattrall is very forgiving about these compelling mishaps: “I was in New York for the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993. You become so hungry for clarity. When you’re there, and you’re living history in real time, it’s confusing.”

It’s definitely a challenge to anyone in thrall to a more straightforward, patriotic narrative. That’s another reason you can only imagine it on the radio; I just can’t see it getting green-lit by more conservative studio executives. “Good!” Cattrall says, amused. “People should be challenged!” Besides, it’s not all chaos – she finds “all of these stories incredibly comforting, because they’re so filled with humanity and so filled with adventure for a new time.” Did it ever make her think maybe an agency for meddling in other people’s affairs was bound to be a bit sketchy? “No, no,” she says, smiling. “I’m not an isolationist.”

Back at it … Cattrall in And Just Like That.

Central Intelligence continues Kim Cattrall’s relationship with Radio 4, a relationship that is kind of curious, like discovering Madonna is a really good friend of your uncle. “I listen to a lot of Radio 4, I’m a big fan. I love the BBC,” she says, “it’s personal and professional. I met my partner there.” Sure enough, perched on a printer behind her is a photo of Cattrall and Russell Thomas, a sound engineer she met in 2016 at Radio 4, a meet-cute that couldn’t have happened without Cattrall’s long-term connection with Woman’s Hour (which is like Madonna being best friends with your mum).

“A number of years ago, they asked me if I would be a guest editor,” Cattrall says. “I talked about being child-free – it wasn’t about statistics, I wasn’t an expert, I was just talking about things that I felt were relevant.” That year, she had a terrible bout of insomnia and “had to learn how to sleep again”. Woman’s Hour ran the diary of this relearning, through cognitive behavioural therapy, for its whole 45 minutes, in 2016. “I was flabbergasted,” Cattrall remembers. “It was so personal. When I’m an actress, I feel like it’s a lie that tells the truth. This was different – this was just what happened.”

Cattrall has always had joint British, Canadian and American citizenship, her parents having emigrated from Liverpool to Canada in 1956, when she was a baby. She went back to Liverpool in her late teenage years, had her first experience of theatre at the Liverpool Playhouse, then later in the West End, and studied at Lamda. “I was always other; I wasn’t American, I was a little bit different. I wasn’t a beach girl.” For years, all her casting choices were about finding a way to get back on stage. “It was always in the back of my mind: if I do this film, then I can pay my rent for a year or half a year, and that means I can go and do that play. That was the mathematical equation. I was trained in theatre, and also, the parts for women in theatre are so much better than they are in film.”

Given a fair Shakespeare … Cattrall in Antony and Cleopatra at the Liverpool Playhouse in 2010. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

In fact, she corrects, maybe she overstated that claim a bit. Even if theatre was the end goal, she admits that she “fell in love with cinema working with John Boorman and Brian De Palma, these incredible film-makers who I grew up with.” Those films, respectively, were The Tiger’s Tail in 2006, a classy but rather puzzling movie also starring Brendan Gleeson, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which she gave a performance so dripping with contempt as Tom Hanks’s wife that, even though the film didn’t ignite critically, it was still incredibly memorable. She appeared in comedy classics such as Police Academy and Porky’s – but “the young woman’s role [in those films] was never much, on paper. A girlfriend of mine once said: ‘You’re a character actress in a leading lady’s body.’ And I thought: ‘I’ll take it.’ Because [with character actor roles] you get this smorgasbord of delight.”

In the 2010s, it dawned on Cattrall that she should be doing more of what she liked. “Time can be short but it can be long while it lasts, I think it’s Strindberg [who said it], but anyway; especially after losing your parents, which you see up close.” She also lost her brother, in 2018, when he took his own life.

“When I was younger, I needed the experience,” she continues. “I needed to be on a set, I needed to understand how it worked. Now, it’s ‘how do I want to spend my time? Where do I want to spend my time?’ The personal losses accumulate and you know that it’s all finite.”

Among other things, her new carpe diem spirit led to the TV series Sensitive Skin, “a passion project” she executive produced and also starred in, set in Canada, adapted from the British black comedy of the same name. “It was such a wonderful collaboration, because I said to them early on: ‘Both of you guys [writer Bob Martin, director Don McKellar] are really excited, but I just want to let you know that, I’m a woman and I am going through the menopause, so I’m going to have quite a lot to say about this.’”

Bed fellows … Kristin Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Cattrall in Sex and the City. Photograph: Alamy

It is often described as a show about a woman struggling with ageing and losing her looks, which oversimplifies her feelings to the point of misrepresentation; it’s more about a kind of hallucinatory thwartedness. “I’ve been a producer in a number of things that I’ve starred in, which has made me privy to conversations that, as an actor, I probably wouldn’t have been,” Cattrall says. “I’m really appreciative of that. I’ve had a life’s experience. I want to bring it on board. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”

Following that mantra, she also did Antony and Cleopatra at the Liverpool Playhouse in 2010, and Liverpool John Moores University seized the advantage of her birthplace affiliation, making her an honorary fellow the same year. She then did Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old Vic in 2013, and had a role at the Royal Court lined up in 2015 when the above-mentioned insomnia hit.

Cattrall’s love of radio wasn’t much reflected in the first act of her career: podcasts didn’t exist – “or the word didn’t exist, at least” – and regular radio work was hardly going to cross-subsidise theatre, or anything else besides. But she had always loved radio as a form, growing up on Vancouver Island, where there was barely any TV: “So, to get a worldview, you’d listen to the BBC. When I first moved to New York at 16, I didn’t have a TV, I would listen to radio drama, which had been incredibly popular in the 40s and 50s, but that had waned by the time I was experiencing them. It’s so wonderful to use your imagination, for not everything to be done for you. There’s something about the human voice, so intimate, that puts you in a different place.”

This is a real portrait of the actor as a young woman, living in a garret at the start of the 70s, getting lost in old-fashioned audio drama, with an A-list career waiting for her round the corner. Forget about Sex and the City – I’d watch that as a box set.

Central Intelligence is on Radio 4 on 6 September.