Rosie O'Donnell, 64, says she was "nervous" and caught off guard filming a bed scene with longtime friend Cynthia Nixon for the "Sex and the City" spinoff, a role she took only because Nixon asked her directly.
O'Donnell made the comments Thursday on Amy Poehler's "Good Hang" podcast, describing the experience of playing a virgin nun who sleeps with Nixon's character in the Season 3 premiere of "And Just Like That." The former talk show host said she agreed to the part without reading the full script, and regretted that decision the moment she saw what the scene required.
The storyline, which the New York Post detailed when the premiere aired, features Nixon's Miranda Hobbes, now single and dating women after her breakup with the character Che Diaz, having a sexual encounter with a guest character named Mary, a nun played by O'Donnell. The scene drew attention for its provocative premise inside the long-running HBO franchise.
On the podcast, O'Donnell explained that Nixon approached her personally about the role. Showrunner Michael Patrick King had reportedly been writing a part with O'Donnell in mind for every season of the series, but it had never worked out. When Season 3 came around, Nixon pitched the idea directly.
O'Donnell told Poehler she committed on the spot:
"I said, 'Of course, I'll do it with you,' you know. And then I read it, and I'm, like, in bed with just the sheets. I'm like, 'Oh, my God.'"
The 64-year-old, who has been making a public comeback in recent years after a period out of the spotlight, said the kissing itself wasn't the problem. The discomfort came from what the scene asked her to convey.
"The kissing wasn't hard, but the laying in bed and the wanting us to act like we had just done it... I was like 'Uhh.' But I'm a little immature when it comes to that."
Poehler offered a simpler explanation: "Also, it's weird to kiss your friends." O'Donnell agreed immediately. "Yes, exactly."
O'Donnell recalled that King, the showrunner, tried to coax a more intense performance out of the two actresses during filming. She recounted his direction and her internal reaction:
"Then Michael said, 'You know, you guys can be a little bit more...,' and I'm thinking, 'I can't, really.'"
The scene marked only the second time in O'Donnell's career that she had filmed anything resembling an intimate sequence. The first came years earlier during her stint on FX's "Nip/Tuck," where she shot a sex scene with the late actor Julian McMahon. That experience, too, was unfamiliar territory for O'Donnell, who built her career on daytime television, hosting "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" from 1996 to 2002, rather than on edgy cable dramas.
Despite the discomfort, O'Donnell was effusive in her praise of Nixon, calling her "one of the best actresses that we have."
"She stands up for injustice wherever she sees it. She puts her money where her mouth is. She loves her children and her wife."
She added simply: "I admire her greatly."
The admiration runs both ways. In May 2025, Nixon appeared on Andy Cohen's SiriusXM show "Radio Andy" and revealed that the production had been trying to cast O'Donnell since the series began. "Finally, we snagged her for the pilot of Season 3," Nixon said.
Nixon praised O'Donnell's work in the role without reservation: "She was so centered and wonderful, you know, so real and tender, and hopeful."
The storyline drew conservative criticism for its premise, a beloved franchise using a nun's loss of virginity as a plot device in a same-sex encounter. For viewers who remember the original "Sex and the City" as boundary-pushing but grounded in a certain New York glamour, the spinoff's creative choices have increasingly tested the limits of the audience that made the franchise a cultural fixture.
O'Donnell, for her part, has stayed busy beyond the HBO cameo. She recently brushed off FCC concerns ahead of a guest-hosting stint on ABC, and she is set to return to "The View" for a 30th-anniversary special, part of a broader media re-emergence that has kept her name in headlines.
Nixon, 60, continues to work steadily as well, with roles on "The Gilded Age" alongside her "And Just Like That" duties. The two women's friendship dates back to Nixon's appearances on O'Donnell's daytime show in the late 1990s, a bond that, by O'Donnell's own telling, is the only reason she ended up in a bed scene on premium cable at 64.
Season 3 of "And Just Like That" also introduced new guest stars, including Mehcad Brooks as Marion Odin, an award-winning film editor whose relationship with Nicole Ari Parker's married character Lisa becomes what Nixon described as "humorously cloudy." The premiere leaned into provocation across multiple storylines, including an awkward phone sex scene between Carrie and Aidan.
O'Donnell's candid account of her discomfort is notable precisely because she is no stranger to controversy or to putting herself in uncomfortable public positions. She has courted political attention for years with sharp public commentary. But filming an intimate scene with a close friend, under a director asking for "a little bit more," landed differently than any political dust-up.
When a performer calls her own scene "horrifying," audiences are entitled to wonder whether the writers room is serving the story, or just chasing a reaction.
