‘And Just Like That…’: Why Willie Garson’s character became a monk

nypost.com:

was revealed in episode 10 of season two, which aired last week on Max. Garson, a memorable presence in the original “Sex and the City” series and season one of AJLT, died from cancer in September 2021 at the age of 57 — leaving producers wondering how to tie up a rather significant and sad loose end.“We didn’t want Stanford to die,” King said of the final decision during an August 17 episode of the podcast, “And Just Like That… The Writers Room.” “We wanted Willie to be alive, as Stanford, somewhere in the world.”“I would say it was a Band-Aid, it was a fast fix,” he said. “It was like thin ice.

We skated over it because we had to, because he wasn’t in the show suddenly.”During the first season of the spinoff, Garson had shot three episodes before he decided to take a step back from filming, due to his illness.

They explained later in the first season that his character was in Japan on a TikTok tour. But during the penultimate episode of AJLT’s sophomore season, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw, received a letter from Stanford, which revealed that he decided to remain in Japan and become a Shinto monk.King revealed that they wrote this in the script due to a real-life experience that the cast had when he and Parker were visiting temples in Kyoto in 2010, after promoting the second “Sex and the City” movie, which he said wasn’t received very well. “I’d light a candle, I’d look at the flowers,” King said during the podcast. “And because it was Sarah Jessica and I, it always felt more than just me.

It was quietly us. So when I started thinking like, ‘Where is Stanford, what do we do?'”“I somehow tapped into that feeling that Sarah Jessica and I had, because I know Carrie and Stanford had a very deep bond.