If you go back and watch Sex And The City with an HBO Max subscription, you’ll see all sorts of famous actors you might forget were in the series. But one guest spot that’s too memorable to overlook is when Kristen Johnston was on an episode in Season 6. Johnston just reflected on where she was at in her life when she took on the role in 2004.
In an episode called “Splat!”Johnston plays Lexi Featherston, who Carrie calls one of “New York’s legendary party girls”. During a party Carrie is also at, she sees Lexi snorting a line of cocaine before she starts smoking at the function, and is asked to put it out or go out in the snow. It leads Lexi to go on a rant about how New York is changing. She declares she’s “so bored I could die!" before falling out of a window. Mind you, the party was on the 18th floor of a NYC skyrise.
When Johnston was recently talking about the scene, she was asked if she was sober herself during the time of her special appearance. In her words:
No, I was a hot mess.
Johnston then clarified that she would “never” be on anything while on set, but at the time she was definitely struggling with addiction. Previously, the actress has described her struggles as an “off-and-on relationship” that got worse after wrapping her hit sitcom 3rd Rock From The Sun in 2001. As she added in this new interview on Dear Chelsea:
I was just kind of messy, like late at night after I was doing a lot of theater, a lot of drinking after theater, lots of wine, the occasional foray into cocaine, but not like her. I knew what I was talking about, let’s just put it that way.
In Johnston’s 2012 memoir, Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster, the actress got honest about her struggles with addiction, which started while she was in high school. The worst they got for her was reportedly drinking two bottles of wine and having 10 to 30 Vicodin pills a day at its peak.
These days Johnston says she’s been sober for ten years straight after a “little burble” of a relapse a decade ago, which came after ten previous years of sobriety. While Johnston may have related more to Lexi Featherston back when she was filming the episode than she would have liked, she’s proud of the episode. She said she’s often approached about it as well.
These days Kristen Johnston is the star of the new Chuck Lorre sitcom, Leanne, now streaming with a Netflix subscription. The show about a woman who grapples with life after her husband of 33 years leaves her for another woman was added to the 2026 TV schedule a month ago and remains on Netflix’s top 10.
