Carrie discovered she has a nightmare neighbor on And Just Like That… this week… but could he actually turn out to be a dream come true?
In Thursday’s episode, we learned that underneath Carrie’s Gramercy Park townhouse sits an apartment occupied by cranky British author Duncan Reeves, played by Jonathan Cake (DC’s Stargirl, The Affair). Duncan immediately took a disliking to Carrie due to her habit of loudly stomping around her house in high heels, and they bickered right away, in classic rom-com fashion. (He gave her ugly pink slippers to wear around the house. The nerve!) But Duncan later opened up to Carrie about his difficulties working on a biography of Margaret Thatcher, and she confessed her nerves about writing fiction for the first time. So could their shared passion for writing lead to another kind of passion, perhaps?
Having Carrie bond with another writer “was exciting for us,” executive producer Julie Rottenberg tells TVLine, because she hasn’t had that kind of connection with a man before, “aside from Berger in the original [Sex and the City]… and we all know how that turned out.” (Ah yes, we all remember the infamous Post-it.)
But “there is sort of a fantasy of being able to connect with someone in a very intellectual and emotional way,” Rottenberg adds. “There’s nothing better than cracking a problem together with a writing partner and thinking together and learning how the other person thinks and helping each other. It’s thrilling.”
Plus, “we’ve never seen Carrie write with anyone else,” EP Elisa Zuritsky points out. “In some ways, this season, probably more than any other in the whole series, really leans into Carrie as a writer in a more real way.” But Rottenberg is quick to caution that, at this point, Carrie and Duncan “really are only connecting in a cerebral, intellectual way.” So far, anyway. (Aidan is hundreds of miles away in Virginia, after all.)
