'Sex and the City' Q&A: Willie Garson

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So what was it like being part of the phenomenon?
WILLIE GARSON: It was bizarre and fantastic. I always say that you get one of these, if you're lucky, per career. Certainly in New York, there was nothing like it. It was like being on the Yankees. We were hometown heroes. If you picked up any magazine or newspaper, you'd feel like we must be getting an audience of 90 million people a week...because the themes and the styles and the heat around it just kind of permeated throughout society. So it was really satisfying. We have a line in the movie: I'm drinking a cosmopolitan and I go, ''Why did we stop drinking these?'' And Sarah Jessica goes, ''Because everyone else started drinking them.'' And I thought, wow, it's so smart. The writing is so smart. We actually tried another [drink] for a couple episodes — the Flirtini. We tried, but it didn't catch on. It's nice to be on something iconic. A lot of us — certainly character actors — work really hard in everything that we do. But it's nice when something catches on to the point where everyone's noticing.

Did you have any weird fan encounters?
It's always weird. Certainly toward the end. The season when Sarah was pregnant was really weird. We'd show up on location and there would be 5,000 people standing there. I didn't even know where we were shooting that day. It would be like, ''How the hell did they find us?'' And, you know, it's hard to lock down a street in New York, so I've had people come up me and ask me for a quarter in the middle of a scene. Some homeless guy literally would walk up to you in the middle of the scene and ask you for a quarter.

Did you expect Stanford to start dating a good-looking man like Marcus (Sean Palmer)?
Oh God, no. I was like, ''What kind of troll are they going to put me with?'' And then we have the scene where Samantha walks in the bathroom and I'm getting serviced, and she tells [Carrie] and she's like, ''Hold on a second — he was getting one?'' And Samantha goes, ''I know — surprised me too.'' [Laughs] You never know.

Was it easy to slide back into your roles for the movie?
It was really easy. It's so comfortable. We had a very ambitious script and Michael kept saying to the studio, ''Just imagine if these people didn't have a seven-year [relationship], how long it would take to shoot.'' Basically, the direction was ''action'' and ''cut.'' Because there's nothing to do. You don't have to work on relationships, you don't have to work on characters, you don't have to do anything. It's just, ''Oh, here we are.'' So that's pretty glorious. That made it really easy and fun. And as we were getting to the end, there was a scene that we were shooting where all of us were sitting on the table. And we had the same emotions that we had during the series at the end. I remember I was the one — I'm the corniest one — I'm the one [who] said to Michael, ''You know, you realize this is probably the last time we're all going to be sitting here together.'' And everyone got all teary again. It's just like, we're in each other lives. Except for me and Chris Noth. I don't want to be anywhere near that guy's life. [Laughs]