Sarah Jessica Parker is opening up about working closely with her husband Matthew Broderick.
The Hollywood couple star in the Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite”, portraying three different couples across a series of vignettes.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter about the experience of working together, Parker recalled hearing concerns from others over how it might affect their personal lives.
“I think we were more so thinking about the play, like, ‘How are we going to do this?’ And I only thought about being concerned when people ask us, ‘Are you concerned that this is going to be harmful to your marriage?’ And then I was worried. ‘Well, should we be?'” she shared.
In fact, she explained, working together allowed the spouses — who wed in 1997 — to spend more time together than they ever had before.
“We’ve never spent this much time together ever, even before we had kids. Even when we were just dating,” Parker said.
“But it’s a very different kind of time,” she clarified. “It’s not like we’re spending more time together talking. We’re spending time together working in an alternate universe. We’re not ourselves.”
The two share three children: 19-year-old James, and 12-year-old twin daughters, Tabitha and Marion.
Part of what’s been helping to keep those boundaries strict is making sure the couple still have their own privacy from each other.
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“And we don’t always go out together after the show. And now our days are freed up again. So we still have our autonomy during the day,” she said. “So it’s feeling more kind of like it used to. But it’s been great.”
While the two have been married for 25 years together now, they’ve never been very public about their relationship.
They shared that coming together in this play did raise concerns about how it might invite the public to pry into their private lives.
“I think we’ve kind of figured out how we can talk about the work and also be coy about us. Because it seems fair and right: If I was a person interviewing us, and we were doing a play about marriages and relationships, it would be awfully difficult to not ask where it overlaps with our lives,” Parker admitted. “I’ve always said one of the reasons we’ve had success is because we don’t talk about our marriage. I’m not flattering myself that anyone’s discussing my marriage, but we’re certainly not going to add to it by saying, ‘Well, this is why it works.’”
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The two may not share a lot of insight into their marriage, but they did say that as fellow actors they do offer career advice to each other.
“We talk about it sometimes because it affects our family. So that’s a big part of it, like, ‘Well, if you do that, you won’t be able to take James to college,’ or, ‘You’re going to miss this,’ or, ‘I’ll miss this,’” Parker said. “Like, Matthew at the same time as ‘Painkiller’ was offered another big miniseries for a different network. And we went back and forth.”
“I went from nothing during the pandemic and suddenly had to decide between three things in a weekend,” shared Broderick. “But it wouldn’t be common for me to be cast as Richard Sackler [the pharmaceutical exec behind Oxycontin, whom he plays in “Painkiller”], so there was something sort of attractive about that.”
