Sarah Jessica Parker Footloose
Sarah Jessica Parker (born March 25, 1965, Nelsonville, Ohio) played Rusty in Footloose (1984). She was 18 during production — fourteen years before Sex and the City.
A child stage actor before she was a teen movie actor
Parker had been working since she was eight. She made her Broadway debut at eleven in the 1976 revival of The Innocents and starred in the title role of Annie on Broadway in 1979. (wikipedia, britannica)
"Parker made her Broadway debut at the age of 11 in the 1976 revival of The Innocents, going on to star in the title role of the Broadway musical Annie in 1979." — Wikipedia, Wikipedia
In 1982 CBS cast her as the lead of the high-school sitcom Square Pegs (1982–83), a one-season cult favorite that ran the year before Footloose. The show was cancelled but the performance — Patty Greene, the hopeful misfit — was the part that put her in front of feature-film casting agents.
She nearly turned down Rusty
The Footloose producers wanted Parker as Rusty but asked her to dye her hair red. Parker refused. The producers eventually relented, and the role became the first major film performance of an eighteen-year-old who would, in another fourteen years, become one of the most recognizable women on American television. (wikipedia)
She played Rusty as the chorus voice of Bomont's teenage social scene — the friend who knows the gossip, dates the slow boy, fronts the dance lesson. The "Let's Hear It for the Boy" sequence, where she leads Willard through the four-count, is structurally the film's most direct musical-number — the place where Footloose lets itself be the musical it has been resisting being.
A long climb to Sex and the City
Parker's 1984 was busy: Footloose in February, Firstborn (with Peter Weller, Teri Garr, and Robert Downey Jr.) later in the year. She would not have a star vehicle of her own for almost a decade.
| Year | Film | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1982–83 | Square Pegs | Television lead |
| 1984 | Footloose | Rusty |
| 1984 | Firstborn | Drama with Peter Weller |
| 1991 | L.A. Story | Steve Martin |
| 1992 | Honeymoon in Vegas | Andrew Bergman |
| 1993 | Hocus Pocus | Disney; cult favorite |
| 1994 | Ed Wood | Tim Burton |
| 1996 | Mars Attacks! | Tim Burton |
| 1996 | The First Wives Club | Hugh Wilson |
| 1998–2004 | Sex and the City | Carrie Bradshaw; Emmys, Globes |
| 2008 | Sex and the City: The Movie | |
| 2021–present | And Just Like That… | HBO Max |