The cast of And Just Like That suffered a huge loss when Willie Garson, who played Stanford Blatch, passed away in September 2021.
Fortunately, the actor was able to star in a few episodes, but he was unable to finish out the rest of the show. As a result, the writers sent him to Japan, explaining that he is going to manage a TikTok star — and he is divorcing Anthony (Mario Cantone).
Now, writer Michael Patrick King revealed what would have happened if Garson was still alive.
“Stanford was going to have a midlife crisis,” he shared. “Stanford’s character always had a borderline career as a manager, and we were like going to explore the fact that it wasn’t a real career. It was going to be Carrie [Sarah Jessica Parker] and him, feeling the shifts. Anthony and him were probably going to have split anyway,” he continued.
“Then we would keep both of them in, and everybody would be relieved that they were divorced because it was not pleasant for anybody. But there was a series of really fun, flirty, hilarious confidante scenes with Carrie that I loved. That old, old, very specific chemistry that Carrie and Stanford have, which is based totally on the uniqueness of Willie and Sarah Jessica’s history,” he added.
Though the ending wasn’t received well by fans — they thought Stanford deserved a better outcome — King revealed why he ultimately went with writing Garson out of the show.
“Life and death is one thing in fiction: When it’s real, it’s not funny or cute. I didn’t want to even flirt narratively with cute business about where he is,” he said. “I knew the audience would never invest in it, because they knew he was never coming back. It’s the most threadbare writing I’ve ever done just to move him along without much maneuvering, because it was just so sad. There was no way I could write myself out of that in any charming, cute way.”
Meanwhile, Cynthia Nixon, who plays Miranda Hobbes, approved of the character’s exit.
“We just wanted, you know, people to not be distracted or already feel, certainly with the death of Willie Garson, [which is] such a painful thing and already [something] viewers had to contend with. We didn’t want them to be distracted from the fictional characters,” the red-headed beauty noted.
