Cynthia Nixon Isn’t ‘Wildly Comfortable’ Getting Naked For ‘And Just Like That.’ Here’s Why She Did it Anyway

And just like that, the women of Sex and the City are back for season two of the Max spinoff series, and we’ve already seen a whole lot more of Miranda Hobbs (Cynthia Nixon) than we did in season one.

In the premiere of And Just Like That…, Miranda strips down for steamy hot tub sex with her partner, Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez)—a choice Nixon was mostly “game” for, despite not feeling “wildly comfortable” with filming nude scenes. “The show is about sex, and sometimes people have sex with their clothes on, but most often they are naked when they have sex,” the 57-year-old actor told InStyle. “So, I always try and make a decision about would she, realistically speaking, be naked here. In which case—okay, it’s not my favorite thing, I don’t feel wildly comfortable about it—but okay, I’m game. Let’s do it. If she’s in a flotation tank, chances are she’s naked, right?”

This echoes what Nixon told Entertainment Tonight in another promotional interview. “It’s just one of the main subjects of the show is sex,” she said earlier this week. “People having sex and people having great sex and people having terrible sex and people having hilarious sex.”

For Miranda, Nixon explained, sex is also a tool to demonstrate character growth. “Miranda is a total control freak, so she’s tried to maybe kind of—for the first time really—let go,” she said. “Some of it seems fun at first, but I think it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. It’s really hard for Miranda to not know what the ground beneath her feet actually is and who the person next to her really is.”

Beyond the sex scenes, Nixon told InStyle that Miranda’s relationship with Che impacted how much skin her character was willing to show outside of the bedroom. “She fell in love with Che and started having this very exciting sex, so we saw a lot more skin,” Nixon said. “We saw shoulders and neck and arms.”