Sarah Jessica Parker was caught taking a smoke break in Greenwich Village years after she said publicly she’s “generally not a smoker.” Parker, 48, was seen inhaling on the stoop of a Village apartment building like a teen in a rebellious outfit of sunglasses, black leather jacket and jeans. The mother of three wasn’t with any of her kids at the time, however.
The “Sex and the City” star has been known over the years to puff away, but has said she smoked because her character on the show lit up.
In 2004, when Larry King asked Parker, “Are you a smoker,” she replied, “I smoked… in the early years of [playing] Carrie… and of course, when I had a baby I didn’t, and didn’t smoke for two years until I went to Paris and, you know, this is the great seduction of a city like Paris with great architecture and food and wine and, so… it’s not been the easiest thing.”
She added that she told the show’s writers at the time in Paris, “Must she smoke again?… But it’s not been the easiest thing to not to smoke since then.”
When King asked Parker if she smoked after the HBO hit ended, Parker said, “of free will, you mean, without being employed? Yes, but I’m generally not a smoker. I mean, I have a child, so it’s changed everything, luckily.”
A few years after her King interview, Parker’s hubby Matthew Broderick hinted in a 2008 talk with New York magazine that both he and Parker were still trying to kick the habit.
“I used to smoke cigarettes, and I still do, lately. I gave that up a long time ago, but every now and then I will fall off for a week,” he said. But he added that wife Sarah Jessica, is “worse than me on that.”
Broderick even said the couple’s young son James was attracted to ciggies at the time, while he was only 6. “He’ll see a cigarette butt and say, ‘What is that? Why do people smoke?’ I can just see the little budding gene of a smoker in there.”