Tough to be green

AMERICAN actress Kristin Davis is best known as the ever-hopeful Charlotte York on Sex And The City, the popular TV show that celebrated female friendships, fabulous clothes and wonderful shoes.

But Davis, 46, is not exactly comfortable with a consumerist culture.

In Singapore to speak at the Conde Nast Traveler World Savers Congress 2011 recently, she tells delegates “it’s tough, it’s challenging” to embrace green and responsible living in such an environment.

She is in Singapore in her capacity as the patron of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an organisation in Kenya dedicated to re-introducing orphaned elephants and rhinoceroses back into the wild, and as the global ambassador for Oxfam, an international confederation tackling poverty around the world.

Davis says: “I sometimes have to catch myself. You see a new car and you think ‘Wow, I could get that car, but why do I need a new car, I don’t need a new car.’ It’s an ongoing kind of challenge to not succumb to those pressures.”

Yet, Sex And The City, especially the movie sequels, has been criticised by some for glorifying consumer culture.

Speaking after her speech, Davis, wearing a Prada navy blue dress and Christian Louboutin heels, ponders the irony.

After a short pause, she says: “You know, I could see that point. I think that Sex And The City is meant to be entertainment. We never said we were anything but entertainment. I feel like because we were so successful, people projected a lot onto us.”

She makes a distinction between entertainment and real life, saying: “It’s a tough thing to balance when you’re making movies. People want to go to the movie theatre and escape and I don’t think you can kind of shove messages down their throat.”

Regardless how one might feel about the show, there was no question that it was a big hit and Davis is still very much associated with it.

She says: “Yes! I got called Charlotte last night by a flight attendant on Singapore Airlines. She called me ‘Miss Charlotte’. It was very cute, very very cute. I don’t mind at all.”

It also means that she will always get asked questions about how the four women on the show, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kim Cattrall, get along.

Sounding a little exasperated, she says: “It’s amazing, 15 years I’ve been answering this question. The relationship is really good, I’ve heard from all three of them in the last week. No one ever believes us when we say it. It’s weird, I don’t know how to change that.”

In an instance of life mirroring art, Davis, who is single, recently adopted a baby girl. Her character Charlotte had done the same thing on the show.

It had been conveyed before the interview that she would be keeping mum on her personal life.

Still, asked if being a mother had made her more concerned about what was happening to the world, she says: “Absolutely, we need to think about what kind of world we are leaving behind to our children. Is it going to be a world of cranes and tall buildings everywhere? That’s horrible. Is it going to be a world where there’re no animals living in the wild, only living in zoos? This could happen.”

On her passion for working with animals, she says: “I definitely think that I would like to move to Kenya and look after elephants, I really would sometimes, but we’ll see.

“I love acting but when you’ve focused on something your entire life, sometimes it is nice to have this totally different thing to balance it out, it keeps me kind of sane.” – The Straits Times/Asia News Network

Source: BOON CHAN