Elisabeth Moss may be a brilliant actress, but it seems like her success as Mad Men’s secretary-cum-copywriter Peggy Olson could be backfiring for her. Since the show has started, she’s been part of two other high profile projects - and she played an assistant in both of them. First, she costarred with Raul Esparza and Jeremy Piven in a Broadway production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, which concluded with Piven’s hilarious fake “mercury poisoning” incident. Now, she’s in the new Sarah Jessica Parker/Hugh Grant vehicle Did You Hear About the Morgans?, where the two actors play a couple who accidentally witness a murder and are placed in the Witness Protection Program. Elisabeth plays SJP’s character’s assistant. First Jennifer Hudson and now this - how does Sarah Jessica Parker keep getting such high-caliber actors to want to play her second banana?
Anyway, Elisabeth is pretty awesome playing non-assistants too. I loved her as Zoey Bartlet on The West Wing (minus that whole terrible storyline with the gross French boyfriend and the kidnapping), and recently she did this great Funny Or Die video with now-husband Fred Armisen:
There are so many celebrity cameos in the upcoming second Sex and the City movie - Liza Minnelli, Penelope Cruz, Miley Cyrus - that when Bette Midler showed up on the set, nobody was surprised. However, the Divine Miss M wasn’t there to tape a scene. She was there to visit her daughter Sophie, who worked a stint as a production assistant on the movie. “It was a big thrill for her,” Midler told E! Online. “[Sophie] had a great time. She loves the business.”
Some internet searching makes me kind of love Sophie - she graduated from Yale, where she majored in Sociology and learned to speak fluent Mandarin. How many celebrity kids not only go to college but enjoy learning? Plus she and her mom look super cute together.
Chandler Burr, the perfume critic for the New York Times, wrote a lot about Sarah Jessica Parker in his most recent book, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris & New York (Henry Holt, 2008). In the book, he discusses at length some of the process behind SJP’s fragrance Lovely. Although I’ve been skeptical before about SJP loving her assistant or getting her an associate producer credit on the Sex and the City movie, I’m slowly being worn down. Burr had this to say:
I had dinner one evening at Josie’s on Third Avenue with Melinda Relyea, Parker’s assistant, because we found we had a friend in common, Clay Floren, so the three of us got together. It wasn’t an interview about Parker, and I wasn’t taking notes, but Relyea turned out to be an interested observer of her situation. She commented at one point - she was speaking about her job - ‘No matter who we’re with, movie stars, producers, fans, whoever it is, Sarah Jessica never introduces me as her assistant. She says, “This is Melinda Relyea.’” It was signifcant to her, and she said so. It wasn’t, she said, that they never had tense moments. They did. ‘But at the end of the it’s me and her in the airplane seats next to each other, going over whatever we need to go over, and she’s never, ever not made that work.’
As promised, here’s a reader submission regarding the portrayal of Louise (Jennifer Hudson), Carrie’s assistant in Sex and the City. The writer is Lisa-Marie from Glasgow, who writes a blog called Last Year’s Girl. NOTE: This post contains spoilers. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, read at your discretion.
I never saw any more than a couple of episodes of Sex and the City during its oh-so-fabulous, early noughties heyday; but perhaps the one defining image it seared into the pop cultural receptor at the front of my brain is of Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, perched in front of a MacBook as she files that week’s column late into the evening. And so I feel a little bit cheated after watching the big budget continuation of Ms Bradshaw’s tramps and travails through Manhattan - it turns out that, while she has the money to pay for a top of the range laptop and sparkly pink mobile phone, she doesn’t even know how to send a text message. What’s a girl to do but hire an assistant?
In yet another Sex and the City-related interview (wait, there’s a movie coming out? I had no idea!), Sarah Jessica Parker makes yet another reference to her assistant. Answering a question about the Jennifer Hudson assistant character, SJP said:
I have a very young assistant, and she’s very young. She’s been with me 5 years, and she’s still in her twenties, and she’s exceptional and brilliant and at this point probably, this job is beneath her. But she became an Associate Producer on the movie because people were so taken with her. I feel that kind of relationship; I understand what it means to you. She came to New York with a dream, my assistant, and a lot had to do with the idea of NYC and what this city symbolizes for people.
Wait, does anyone know her assistant’s name? Is there a way we can verify this? Anyone? Bueller?
Update: Readers Rachel and Anna emailed me within seconds of each other. There are two associate producers listed for the movie. One is Melinda Relyea, who was SJP’s assistant for Failure to Launch and The Family Stone. Nice work, ladies.
This week’s New York magazine has a cover story profile of one Ms. Sarah Jessica Parker who, if you haven’t heard, is starring in some movie about sex and cities or something. In one part of the interview, Parker gets locked out of her apartment. Witness:
Parker and I are sitting in the back of her Town Car, across the street from her building. She left her keys in the door that morning, when she was blocked in by the paparazzi, and now she’s locked out.
“Shite. I can’t believe this. It’s kind of funny,” she says, BlackBerrying like crazy. “Who else has freaking keys? And where’s my poor, sweet, overworked assistant who is not picking up?”
There’s something about this statement that makes me think Parker is misleading us. For example, who actually says “shite” when they want to say “shit”? She’s clearly on her guard in front of the reporter and is being as careful as she can to continue presenting the image of herself as classy and elegant. Calling her assistant ‘poor, sweet, overworked’ smacks of artificiality. Maybe she does have a sense of humor, and maybe she’s nice to her assistant. But for some reason, this sentence feels scripted in that fake “Look how self-deprecating I am!” kind of way. Who really speaks like that, especially when they’ve lost their keys? The last time I lost my keys I said “fuck” a lot more than anything else. I think the last thing SJP wanted was to look bad in front of a journalist, and she’s just babbling to avoid saying something like “my piece of shit assistant who is so fired if she doesn’t pickup.” Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. You guys tell me.
In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a Sex and the City movie coming out. And in case you didn’t know, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is going to have an assistant, played by Jennifer Hudson. And just for the record, yes, we don’t think she needs an assistant either. In the movie, the normally fiancially-idiotic Carrie actually realizes she doesn’t pay her assistant enough to afford those nice shoes and bags she’s toting around. Women’s Wear Daily has more:
Everyone knows of an assistant who tries too hard in the wardrobe department — think, too-high heels, flashy jewelry and slightly off-trend shoes by way of the mall. But what if the assistant was that of Miss Carrie Bradshaw? One could hardly blame such a minion for trying too hard. In the “Sex & the City: The Movie,” Jennifer Hudson’s character plays the assistant to Sarah Jessica Parker. Hudson wears a potpourri of designer bags throughout the film until Bradshaw finally asks what gives. It turns out her assistant found a loophole in the fashion hierarchy: BagBorroworSteal.com. Hudson’s character rents designer bags from the site. In tandem with the launch, New Line Cinema has teamed up with the Web site to bow a Sex & the City collection.
Now we have a way to hook assistants up with cute bags without having to work a shrill, narcissistic prima donna like Carrie Bradshaw.
According to rumors on Gawker, a Columbia U. class of 2007 graduate has landed the role of a lifetime–as Sarah Jessica Parker’s personal assistant. For the honor of fetching Ms. Parker’s lattes and getting her shoes resoled, this lucky assistant is apparently making $200K a year. At first, our response was “dude, fuck that shit.” But after some time to reconsider, we thought…”Only 200,000? Seriously?”
Assistants to celebrities tend to have to sacrifice their lives for their bosses. It’s not a nine-to-five corporate gig by any means, it’s a form of indentured servitude. During one episode commentary for Sex and the City, SJP admits that she sent her assistant out to get her a pregnancy test the day she found out she was with child. All we’re saying is… if you have to go on a pregnancy test run for your boss, 200K is a pittance. We bet J.Hud is making way more than that.
Last week, we wrote about the news that Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson would be playing Carrie’s assistant in the upcoming Sex and the City movie. However, there may have been more drama behind the scenes. The website MediaTakeOut is reporting that the film’s producers originally cast Beyonce, but she was a drama queen, so they replaced her with J.Hud. Cele|bitchy doesn’t totally buy the story, which claims that Beyonce made outrageous demands, such as her character only wearing clothes from House of Dereon (her mom’s clothing line).
As for whether the rumor is true, you can decide for yourself. What isn’t up for debate, though, is the sheer ugliness level of these boots that poor J.Hud had to wear:
Ever thought to yourself, “I have a master’s degree, and I still had to start as someone’s assistant?” Well, Variety reports that even though Jennifer Hudson has an Oscar, she still has to be someone’s assistant. In this case, she’s playing the assistant to Carrie Bradshaw (AKA Sarah Jessica Parker) in the upcoming Sex and the City movie.
This makes us wonder…what exactly would Scary Sadshaw (tm Gawker)’s assistant have to do? We’ve created this handy list:
Organize shoes by color, year, and heel height
Schedule lunch with ‘the girls’
Apologize to friends Carrie advertently or inadvertently said something rude to
Get nail polish off of computer’s “Enter” key
Make audio tapes of ramblings she makes while drunk off of pink cocktails
Transcribe audio into ‘columns’
Call Aidan and hang up when he answers
Tell details about your own sex life so Carrie can add thinly veiled references to you in her column
Keep all Post-It notes safely out of viewing range
Check mailbox and toss out bills, bank statements, or threatening letters from Natasha
Make follow-up appointments for Carrie’s mole removal
Tell Carrie she is awesome at least 15 times per day
Refill Kleenex supply on nights when Big doesn’t call/come home
Regularly update “People Carrie Has Slept With” database
Elisabeth Moss may be a brilliant actress, but it seems like her success as Mad Men’s secretary-cum-copywriter Peggy Olson could be backfiring for her. Since the show has started, she’s been part of two other high profile projects - and she played an assistant in both of them. First, she costarred with Raul Esparza and Jeremy Piven in a Broadway production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, which concluded with Piven’s hilarious fake “mercury poisoning” incident. Now, she’s in the new Sarah Jessica Parker/Hugh Grant vehicle Did You Hear About the Morgans?, where the two actors play a couple who accidentally witness a murder and are placed in the Witness Protection Program. Elisabeth plays SJP’s character’s assistant. First Jennifer Hudson and now this - how does Sarah Jessica Parker keep getting such high-caliber actors to want to play her second banana?
There are so many celebrity cameos in the upcoming second Sex and the City movie - Liza Minnelli, Penelope Cruz, Miley Cyrus - that when Bette Midler showed up on the set, nobody was surprised. However, the Divine Miss M wasn’t there to tape a scene. She was there to visit her daughter Sophie, who worked a stint as a production assistant on the movie. “It was a big thrill for her,” Midler 
Chandler Burr, the perfume critic for the New York Times, wrote a lot about Sarah Jessica Parker in 
