Sex and the City author Candace Bushell says she once went for a ‘romantic’ dinner with John Corbett

Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell revealed in a new interview that she went out for a ‘romantic’ dinner with actor John Corbett, who played Aidan on the HBO show.

The 61-year-old, whom the character of Carrie Bradshaw was based on, appeared on the latest episode of The Bradshaw Boys podcast, and told the hosts about her surprising experience with the actor.

But despite a fun night out, she said she will never be ‘Team Aidan,’ in part because her mother doesn’t like the character. 

‘I’m never gonna be Team Aidan,’ Candace said. ‘I can’t for a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons was that my mother hated Aidan on the TV show.

‘She would watch and be like, “I hate that Aidan,”‘ she said. ‘But my mother was always saying, “Get rid of him.” And I was like mom, it’s not up to me, Idon’t write the show, so I can’t do it.’

‘I did go to dinner with, what’s his name who played Aidan — John Corbett,’ she added. ‘I kind of went out to dinner with him, it was romantic, [but] all I could think was, “My mother’s gonna kill me!”

‘And then he goes back to LA, and then I’m like, two days later, “Oh, he’s dating Bo Derek. You cannot compete with Bo Derek. I mean, forget it.”‘ 

Corbett has been with the actress since 2002.   

As for Mr. Big, Candace said her mother wasn’t much a fan of him either — but in this case, she meant not the character, but the real-life person that Mr. Big was based on.

‘Of course, she knew the real Mr. Big because he’d come to the house. She’s like, “He’s so stupid,”‘ she said. 

Like on the TV show, the real-life Mr. Big also got married, devastating Candace. But unlike in the show, she didn’t have an affair with him when he was married.

That storyline was added in by creator Darren Star because fans loved Mr. Big so much — and Darren even asked Candace to play his wife, Natasha.

She was not interested. 

In the podcast interview, Candace also spoke about the fashion in the show, explaining that Darren Star directed for Carrie to dress like Candace does in real life.

That did involve some liberties, though: For example, Candace never had Carrie’s iconic nameplate necklace, and things the lederhosen Carrie wore to a picnic was ‘wacky.’ 

‘I was actually not wearing tutus,’ she added. ‘But I probably would have when I was younger.’

Carrie’s shoe obsession, though, seems to be mostly based in Candace’s reality.   

‘Compared to people who really really have so many pairs of shoes, like Imelda Marcos… I probably had as many shoes as I could fit into a closet,’ she said.

‘Shoes are, kind of, in a lot of ways, more affordable than clothes, and New York was also such a place where there was this — people would say this, they would say, if you walk into a restaurant, the maître d’ looks at a person’s shoes,’ she said.

‘Everything else can be wrong, but if you’re wearing the right shoes, you can get in anywhere.

‘That’s one of the reasons why the shoes were so important. The shoes, they could almost literally grant you access to this exclusive, glittering, glamorous world of New York City.

Like Carrie, Candace also had experience writing for Vogue, and recalled the time editor-in-chief Anna Wintour gave her an assignment to wear and write about rubber dresses.  

‘Si I wore these rubber dresses, and then she said, OK, Candace, and now we’re going to do a photoshoot,’ she recalled.

‘And then O had to pose with Jaime King. She was, like, a supermodel. She [was] 16 and she was six feet tall, and I was like, God, this is great. I think at the time I was 35… and I’m 5’6″.’