Kristin Davis says 'Sex and the City' helped her overcome addiction

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Of all the accolades that Sex and the City collected over its six-season run on HBO, this one stands out.

The actress Kristin Davis, who played prim Fab Four member Charlotte York, revealed on the latest edition of the Origins With James Andrew Miller podcast that acting on that series and others helped her overcome alcoholism. Early in her career, Davis also did a stint on General Hospital in 1991, and, beginning in 1995, played the mischievous Brooke on two seasons of Melrose Place. She joined Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kim Cattrall in the show for which she’s best known in 1998, when she was in her early 30s.

Davis said that without acting on shows like SATC, “I don’t think I would be alive. I’m an addict. I’m a recovering alcoholic,” she said, per Entertainment Weekly. “If I hadn’t found acting … acting is the only thing that made me want to ever get sober. I didn’t have anything that was that important to me other than trying to dull my senses.”

Eventually, “I didn’t think I would live to be 30,” Davis said. “I started drinking very young and luckily I quit very young, before any success happened, thank goodness.”

Acting, Davis said, meant that she had “something that was more important to me than just drinking.”

Davis began drinking as a teenager in Southern California to overcome her insecurity.

“I’m kind of shy normally, so I felt like I needed help,” she told The Week in June 2008. “One thing led to another, and I was drinking.”

Her acting began to suffer when she showed up for classes with hangovers, and she knew she had to make a choice.

“I thought, it’s going to be one or the other. I can’t really have both,” Davis said.

She went to rehab and sobered up, although the future Emmy nominee acknowledged back then that she occasionally missed drinking.

“Every once in a while, I’ll be with friends and they’ll be drinking red wine, and I’ll think, in a really innocent way, ‘Oh wow, that’s such a wonderful glass of red wine. Wouldn’t it be fun to drink it?'” Davis recalled. “Maybe it would be fine, but it’s really not worth the risk.”

A sober Davis ended up loving her time on the buzzy show about female friendships so much that she was one of the three lead actresses in favor of a third movie in the franchise. However, Parker shut down any hopes for a sequel in September 2017, as Cattrall confirmed reports that she wasn’t interested.