Sarah Jessica Parker “panicked” after filming the Sex and the City pilot, as she told costar Kristin Davis on Davis’ podcast, Are You a Charlotte? In fact, Parker even tried to quit the production when HBO ordered it to series.

“I was like, ‘I can’t be on a TV show. I don’t think I’m suited for that,’” Parker told Davis in the podcast’s May 15 episode.

When Sex and the City came around, Parker had been a series regular on other TV shows — Square Pegs, A Year in the Life, and Equal Justice — and the idea of signing on for another long-term TV project “kind of depressed” her, she said.

“I think that it was the idea of doing the same thing over and over and over again,” she explained. “And I think I’d always been lucky that I got to be in a television series, and then it was over. I met great people, had a great experience, worked with great actors, great directors, thought the stories were interesting, wanted to do the shows, and they had shorter lives, maybe one or two seasons. And then I moved on, and I would do a play, or I’d do some readings, and then I’d do a part in a movie, and then I’d do a movie of the week.”

Parker thought at the time that life as a “journeyman” actor was “having it all” and that doing another TV show would mean she couldn’t do those other types of work.

“And it just kind of felt like somebody was, you know, putting their hand over my mouth or something,” she said. “It was very weird.”

And so Parker tried to back out of the project. “I talked to my agents, and I said, ‘Hey, can you get me out of this?’” Parker recalled, adding that she even offered do movies for HBO to fulfill her contract.

But after conversing with CAA agent Lee Gabler and then-HBO executive Chris Albrecht — and after Sex and the City hired co-producer Barry Jossen (with whom Parker worked on the 1995 film Miami Rhapsody) and costume designer Patricia Field — the eventual Carrie Bradshaw portrayer began to see the light.

Parker’s agents told her she would only have to do SATC for a year, but she got excited about working at HBO — which was “kind of an unknown species” at the time, she said — and about filming a TV show just blocks from her New York City home.

“And so it went from being this oppressive idea to endless possibilities,” she said.

Fast forward a quarter-century, and Parker has four Golden Globes, three SAG Awards, and two Emmys because of her SATC work, so we’d say it worked out well for her!