By Damian Foxe
Photography by
David Ferrua

She may play the prim Charlotte on Sex and the City, but Kristin Davis is happy to talk frankly about sex, swearing and being single.
My challenge for today is transforming Kristin Davis from a wide-eyed innocent into a vampy sex goddess. And I'm totally shitting myself. For those of you who tune in to the hit HBO series Sex and the City (because your girlfriend makes you), you'll know her as Charlotte, the prude among four women who make a living out of sex and shopping, and then discuss it over plates of dressing-free salad. For those of you who don't, let's put it this way: Charlotte wears clothes which comparatively make a 65-year-old secretary look more like an FHM cover girl. If she's anything like her character, I'm screwed.
     Kristin skips jauntily into our posh New York studio, evidently in the midst a raucous sex tale with her publicist. She is dressed every inch the rich, if-she-weren't-such-a-goody-goody-she'd-be-a-bitch New York princess she plays on the show. Her hair is scraped back off her porcelain face, which is all doe eyes, bare lips and innocent resolve. And her mouth is set in a smile so wide and trusting that I have the overwhelming urge to charge into the changing room and throw all the ridiculously sexy clothes out of the eighth-floor window.
     "Hi, I'm Kristin," she beams. I scan her svelte 5-foot-5 frame for a shred of evidence that she might be hankering after a shoot involving bondage gear (for some demented reason, I brought a peep-hole bra and silver nipple tassels). But there is none. What on God's green innocent earth was I thinking? Until, hallelujah, less than five minutes later, I'm staring at her perfectly formed naked breasts. Kristin, it seems, is a pro—she's brought her own nude G-string and is stripped down, ready for action. "I love it," she squeals, as her manicured hand alights on a sheer black chiffon corseted dress. "Charlotte would never wear anything like this."
     In fact, Kristin does lots of things that Charlotte would never dream of doing, like getting wasted on bourbon behind the school gym with boys. So what was school like? "Wild," she says, laughing like a naughty schoolgirl. Was she all prim and proper like Charlotte? "To the outside world perhaps. But I drank a lot, which was rebellious." In fact, drinking turned into a problem for Kristin, and in her mid-20s she quit altogether.
     She says she was drawn to alcohol for a number of reasons. "I found it freeing. I'm a little shy and it helped with that. After a while, you get used to it and you need it to be outgoing, and then you've got a problem." But Kristin considers herself lucky. "I figured out early that I had a problem. I don't think I would have been able to handle success at all well had I not already dealt with that."
     Kristin also talks frankly about sex, though without nearly as many expletives as on the show. They've covered female ejaculation, fetishism, masturbation, lesbianism, voyeurism and anal sex. "Don't forget rimming," she says, smiling wickedly. Are there situations where she gets embarrassed by what Charlotte has to do? Kristin looks at me as if I am insane. "Oh, there are tons! I get embarrassed all the time!" Who among the cast is the least shy? "Cynthia [Nixon]," she says without hesitation. "She has no fear, no embarrassment. They say, "Cynthia, we'd like you to be topless," and she just says, "OK." And I could not pull off what Kim [Cattrall] pulls off." I presume she means screwing on the side of a fire truck, executing complex sexual gymnastics on a trapeze and giving a blowjob to the courier who delivers a package to her office. "Why's that?" I ask innocently. "I'm just not that kind of person," she says, mock-tossing her amazing long hair. "I'm not that free with my body. And I couldn't say a lot of the stuff that she says. I'm not that bold."
     Kristin grew up in South Carolina, in what she refers to as a bookish environment (her all-time favorite read is War and Peace). At first her parents didn't like the show and hid videotapes of the series from her grandmother. Kristin even turned down a Playboy shoot on the grounds of parental disapproval. "My manager called Playboy and said, 'Her mother would never speak to her again and she doesn't feel like it's worth it.'" Which is not to say she wasn't pleased by the offer. "I was flattered," she says. "There's nothing wrong with that."
     Despite there differences, however, there's still a lot of prim and proper Charlotte in how Kristin acts, especially around strangers. "People perceive me more like my character, which makes sense. In a lot of the press I've done, I haven't tried to dissuade them from that. I like my character; she's a nice person, and I'd rather they think I am a nice person than not." So she wouldn't like to be seen as the semi-psychotic lunatic she played on Melrose Place? "No! That would be terrible." So Charlotte is the closest to who she really is? "Yeah. I think it's because I've played her for so long."
     Kristin pauses to think about what she's said. "To be honest, it depends on whether we're shooting or not. When we're on TV twice a week and you run into people on the street, they tend to project the character onto you. And I find myself wanting to break that. When someone is talking to me like I'm Charlotte, I start to say a lot of swear words. It's kind of silly, but it gets frustrating being spoken to as if someone knows me when they don't know me at all. When I;m not working, I don't feel like that."
     It's evident that Charlotte has a far smaller range of expression than Kristin does. "It's true, I'm wider," she says, laughing as she gets her double-entendre. "Meaning I get very mad. There have been many times when I've begged the director to let Charlotte yell at somebody. Or punch somebody—men, I mean. They'd say, 'No! Charlotte would never do that.' But some of the things that people have done to Charlotte—they needed to be punched."
     For Kristin, there is one episode in particular that was difficult. "This man shouted obscenities at me in bed," she says. "He was inches from my face, calling me bad female names. Charlotte was supposed to just be surprised, which I can understand for the first scene. Then they show her again, because her friends give her advice about what to do and so she does it again. I'm sorry, I don't care how nice a person is, there's a limit. If she had pushed him off or yelled at him or punched him, which is what I would have done, it would have been fine, but they were like, 'No, no, no. Charlotte would not do that.' Frankly, I think they were wrong."

     As we're on controversial subject matter, I decide to ask the question you're not supposed to ask. Do the cast all get along? "Yes!" she declares. But rumors abound that you don't. "Rumors abound! That's hysterical. We get along fabulously. We're a very tight unit, including our writers and all the people you don't see on camera. We spend 18 hours a day together for most of the year, so it's ludicrous that I have to defend our relationships. People want to know why they don't see us together in restaurants during our time off. Well, everyone has lives, husbands, babies. It doesn't mean we don't get along."
     Ironically, Kristin, whose character was the only one ever married on the show, is the only single one in real life. She's been linked to a series of high-profile actors, the latest being Alec Baldwin, although they've now broken up. She prefers not to talk about it. "Because I'm the only single woman on the show, there's this intensity of attention on my personal life. My initial response was to withdraw my opinions and feelings. I don't have it figured out yet."
     So how would a guy impress Kristin Davis? "I don't know," she giggles. Well then, what's the sexiest outfit a man could wear? She laughs out loud. "I'm from the South, so what I find attractive is an old pair of khakis that are frayed at the edges. They don't look new or pressed. 'No pressing the pants,'" she says in a mock Southern drawl. "And then I'd like a really old broadcloth button-down shirt that's messed up, and some shoes with no socks."
     So would she ever dig a man who was dressed head-to-toe in designer clothes? "Oh, sure!" What about a man who had a bigger wardrobe than her? "No. I doubt it. It's hard to picture." Should men use moisturizer? "Absolutely. Men need to realize they should take care of themselves. I don't mean six products. I mean one. You wash your face, you put on moisturizer and you floss your teeth."
     She's single, she's sexy, her name is Kristin Davis and she lives in New York. Why don't you book yourself a plane ticket. Just don't forget to bring your floss and leave your socks at home.