Actor/Sarah Jessica Parker’s husband (those are apparently equally important titles) Matthew Broderick gave a rather bizarre interview to New York magazine recently, in which he talked about his son’s curiosity about cigarettes. Both Broderick and Parker smoke – though Broderick claims that he gave up smoking and still smokes – all within the same sentence.
“Sarah Jessica Parker still smokes? She, the perfect mother who hates her nannies to be mentioned in news articles? The Greenwich Village icon who starred in a show about sex but refused to take her bra off during the act? No way!”
But apparently it’s so — and the habit rubs off on her husband, Matthew Broderick, and even (gasp!) her 5-year-old son, James Wilkie. At the screening of Broderick’s new vice-filled film, Finding Amanda, where he plays a gamble-holic having an off-the-wagon weekend in Vegas, Ferris Bueller told us all about it.
“I used to smoke cigarettes, and I still do, lately. I gave that up a long time ago, but every now and then I will fall off for a week.” And guess who’s fault that might be? Broderick says SJP is “worse than me on that.” And James Wilkie is “already curious. He’ll see a cigarette butt and say, ‘What is that? Why do people smoke?’ I can just see the little budding gene of a smoker in there.”
[From New York Magazine]
Umm…. umm… so many things I want to say. Struggling to choose which ones. I’m not going to go off on smoking, everyone knows the statistics. What I’m really surprised about is that Matthew Broderick would have such a cavalier attitude towards his son’s relationship with cigarettes – and that such a normally private actor would choose to share such a thing. In sharing it, it seems like Broderick doesn’t understand that this isn’t a good or normal thing.
When I was growing up, the smoking parents of my friends would constantly talk about how bad it was and how they wished they’d never started. Most of them seemed to constantly be making a big deal about how bad it was – seemingly in an attempt to prevent their children from picking up the habit. Several of them smoked in a bathroom or some isolated area. But none of them seemed to have an open, “whatever” sort of attitude about it. If you think you “see the little budding gene of a smoker” in your kid, it seems to me that the least you should do is actively discourage it.
Here’s : Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick and son James Wilke leaving Claridges Hotel in London in September 2005. Header from the US premiere of Sex and the City in New York on May 27th. Images thanks to WENN.
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