‘Sex and the City’: Carrie’s Mexican Honeymoon Wasn’t Filmed in Mexico or Even a Resort
Fans will never forget the scene in the 2008 Sex and the City movie when Mr. Big (Christopher Noth) leaves Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) at the altar. It was as devastating for the audience as it was for Carrie. Despite nursing a broken heart, she takes her besties — Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), Miranda Hobbs (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) — on her would-be honeymoon to Mexico. The funny thing is that the filming location wasn’t in Mexico or even a resort.
Carrie Bradshaw’s non-honeymoon in ‘Sex and the City’ the movie
In the Sex and the City movie, poor Carrie is in bad shape after Big leaves her (again). After arriving at the honeymoon resort with her friends, she can barely get out of bed or eat. But her besties take good care of her and let her grieve.
She slowly ventures outdoors with the others but remains miserable. She wonders if she’ll ever laugh again, and they tell her she will “when something really, really funny happens.”
It happens. Despite obsessively avoiding drinking the water in Mexico, Charlotte accidentally opens her mouth in the shower. She gets an awful case of Montezuma’s revenge, which Carrie thinks is hilarious. And just like that — she laughs.
The Mexican resort in the ‘Sex and the City’ movie was a private home in California
In reality, the water wasn’t an issue because the ladies were never in Mexico in the Sex and the City movie. The entire Mexican honeymoon was shot in Malibu, California, in a private home (albeit a massive one).
The mansion is at 4400 Encinal Canyon Rd. The blogger iamnotastalker went in search of the house and found it. She wrote that the property is “absolutely stunning in person, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was quite a lot of it visible from the street.”
She looked further. “Even the pool area, which was the part of the house featured most prominently in SATC, can be seen from the road! Love it! Quite a bit of the property can be seen from the Pacific Coast Highway as well.”
Then there was the hotel restaurant, which was really a ballroom at an equestrian compound called Hummingbird Nest Ranch in Simi Valley.
Why did the Sex and the City producers create a fake Mexican resort? Possibly because they were already filming some of Samantha and her boyfriend Smith’s scenes at a beach house in Malibu.
Carrie’s bad joke kept the crew from filming in the Caribbean
Sex and the City writers penned plenty of puns for the ladies throughout the TV series and films. Some were funny, some were not so funny, some didn’t age well, and some were downright cringe-worthy.
Carrie’s pun in the Sex and the City movie landed between no-so-funny and cringe-worthy, but the writers liked it so much it prevented the crew from filming in the Caribbean.
When Carrie emerged from her room in Mexico, she wanted to go out for dinner. She explained it by telling the girls she wanted something to pull her out of her “Mexi-coma.”
It turns out the producers had an opportunity to film the honeymoon scenes at a resort in the Caribbean, but they loved Carrie’s pun so much they kept the setting in Mexico.
