To us here at The Deadbolt, before Kim Cattrall took on the role of sexy middle-aged vamp Samantha on Sex and the City, she was Emmy from Mannequin and Gracie Law in Big Trouble in Little China. Although we'll always have a soft spot in our hearts for Cattrall's earlier characters, Samantha Jones made us realize that some older women can still take a young guy's breath away. After six successful seasons on HBO's massively popular Sex and the City, Kim Cattrall and her former castmates - Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristen Davis, and Cynthia Nixon - have reunited for the long-awaited Sex and the City: The Movie, which saunters into theaters on May 30, 2008.

While recently doing press for the big screen extension of Sex and the City, Kim Cattrall sat down with journalists in a Luca Luca designed dress to talk about how it feels to return to Sex and the City, why she originally turned the movie down a few years ago, what Samantha means to her, and how she overcame a number of personal challenges in between the series and the movie.

Kim Cattrall on why she returned to Sex and the City now after she turned it down four years ago:

"What a difference four years makes. I mean, I look back on four years ago and my life was so completely different. First of all, the Sex and the City job was coming to an end, which was really tough, and I was going through a divorce, and because I was on a TV show, that sort of became a headline. And I’d gone through one other divorce, which was really painful, but I did it in a private way, but this was very, very public. And after playing this character, suddenly I was single and I wasn’t really ready for that, and then my dad was diagnosed with Dementia. So, it was a hell of a year, it was a bad, bad year. And I think about that time as just kind of sad."

Cattrall on how she got through such a tough time:

"Well, I think I did the smartest thing possible, I went home to Canada and I felt that I had spent so much time with my Sex and the City family, with my work family, that to go back home and just kind of be with my family was the best the medicine and what I needed. I also think that all of us were exhausted from it, you know. We had done so many 19-hour days. And when we weren’t doing the show, we were promoting the show, and we were so into it. It wasn’t like we were feeling anything other than, 'Wow, this is what we love to do!' But it does take its toll on your home life, because you’re just not there - you can’t be, your head’s somewhere else. So at the beginning of this whole talk about it coming to fruition again, and Michael Patrick King calling me and saying, 'I have a script. I have a gorgeous script. You know, the ideas that we had four years ago are not going to work, but I think I nailed it.' And reading the script and saying, 'You nailed it and them some!' It was like, ‘Wow!’ It was sort of like an episode or the end of the movie. It has that kind of fairytale feeling to me because it was like a second chance at a different kind of ending."

On how the film expands on Samantha, the character:

"Well, I was very happy with the way that all the characters progressed through the six years and I felt that the cancer storyline was really beautifully - season six, the last year, and that relationship she was finally - she’d been in other relationships which I thought were abusive. Richard Wright’s character, he’s not a good guy. And she’s so smart and she’s so on top of it but there’s something - women, you gotta go for the bad guy sometimes. You gotta work that out. And then she gets this really good guy and he’s there for her. So there’s, ‘He stuck with me through cancer, I should be able to stick with him through monogamy. It’s something wrong with me!’ I felt that with those kind of story lines, we were getting to more of Samantha because I think all of us started out - these characters started out two-dimensional, but I think with the playing of it and also just doing it more and more, Michael knew who he was writing for, so did Darren, he knew the actresses, he was writing things and he couldn’t wait to see how they would come out."

Cattrall on what Samantha means to her:

"I think she helped me get through my forties because when I started the show I was forty-one and, actresses especially, they always accuse Hollywood of ageism. But I found that I was doing that to myself because I was really questioning at the age of forty-one if I could indeed play a woman who was that sexual. Could I still make the vamp real? I’m not kidding, this was a true concern of mine and would it be more than just a one-dimensional character, and is this just about the jokes. And Darren Starr said to me, 'No, no, no, these characters are going to evolve, and that’s the great thing about being in a series is that you have the time to tell these stories,' and I had ever done series before. So he kept his word, that’s what came to pass. And I think it got deeper and it got richer and also people started to look differently, I think, because of shows like Sex and the City, differently about forty."

On where she calls home these days:

"In Toronto, I have relatives in Toronto as well and spending time in Vancouver and also in England. I have a lot of relatives on my Aunts and Uncles and cousins are there, and just sort of deciding to take projects that were a little bit different than what I was known for, a little bit than sort of my comfort zone. I mean, doing a play on the West End and playing a quadriplegic was not exactly Samantha Jones, Whose Life is it, Anyway? But there were elements of it because that was written for a man who is a sexist pig in the seventies, so I thought it would be interesting to put a woman in the bed and have sort of the sprinkling of a Samantha or the embodiment of a woman who spoke up for women and was coming onto men in a hospital. I thought that was, just on a very superficial level, was a really interesting twist, and then doing a film with John Boorman, which was wonderful, and of course, My Boy Jack. It’s been good."

Cattrall on the scenes in the movie that reflect her strength:

"Oh, there are so many scenes, it’s so difficult. I just have to say when I was in the screening room and I watched the opening credits, I mean I just got kind of those chills where you feel, ‘Wow, not only we did this, it’s real. It’s happening!’ I just thought all the story lines were so beautifully realized. And again, you’re kind of in a bubble doing your lines, your scenes, so watching the movies of my three co-stars, the movie they made, not just the movie that we made together, it was wonderful. I thought that David Eigenberg was wonderful, so touching."

Cattrall on why the series was so successful:

"Well, I think there was never really a show like this before. I remember seeing Jungle Fever and there was this scene in there where all of these women were getting together and they were talking about their man, and I love that scene because it was just like looking through a peephole of other women’s lives, and I don’t think we’ve seen enough of that. We’ve seen some of it in literature, but we haven’t seen enough on the movie screen. And I think in a very realistic way, which we were allowed to do on HBO, and to understand that women are incredibly complex, and also to teach men how women really are in the sense of we talk about them a great deal. So that can be scary, but I also think they can learn something from that too; how men’s actions affect women in a relationship. And I’ve heard men say, 'I really learned something. I didn’t think breaking up that way was a big problem.' I think that’s a real eye opener. But what I love about the show is that it sort of replaced the workplace for women as family and made it more about friends as family. And anything that brings women together, I think is terrific. The media especially has a lot invested in pitting them against each other, but that’s because they’re so powerful."

Kim Cattrall on the dress she was wearing:

"This is Luka Lupa, shoes are Jimmy Chu."