The OG star reveals how she landed the plum role, the mixed blessing of ‘Sex and the City’ and how she keeps her private life private in this week’s cover story.
The year is 2010. Actress Bridget Moynahan is living in Los Angeles with her young son, Jack, and jumping around in various productions of small-ish films such as Prey, Noise and Ramona & Beezus.
Then she receives a phone call that changes everything.
It’s her friend (and fellow Massachusetts native) Donnie Wahlberg. The two had just worked on a TV pilot together that didn’t get picked up. He wants to know if she’d be interested in playing his sister in a new series. Tentative title: Blue Bloods.
“It was about an Irish Catholic family and hi, those are my people,” she explains. “And it was a family of cops, and I’d be a lawyer in New York City and looking at the dynamics within that. My whole family is already on the East Coast. So, of course that was going to bring me home.”
Now she’s gearing up to say goodbye to the show that changed her life. Moynahan, 52, is currently filming her 14th and final season of the popular Friday night CBS drama (which premieres Feb. 16 at 10 p.m. ET). No standard procedural, the series has cultivated a large and devoted fan base because of its rich connections among the formidable but endearing Reagan family played by the likes of Tom Selleck, Wahlberg and Will Estes. Over the course of the series, which will air its last episode in the fall, Moynahan’s hardworking Erin Reagan has become NYC’s Assistant District Attorney and raised her now-grown daughter, Nicky (Sami Gayle), all while enduring major physical trauma.
Moynahan sits down for her Parade interview inside a Bronx mobile trailer on a Friday afternoon during a break from production, looking effortlessly gorgeous on the Zoom screen in her chunky glasses, cardigan and jeans despite her insistence to the contrary. A former model, Moynahan popped up on TV for the first time in 1999 via a memorable arc on Sex and the City as the glamorous 20-something who wed Chris Noth’s Mr. Big. (In one episode, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw and her girlfriends snidely refer to her Natasha character as “the idiot stick figure with no soul.”) She’s also appeared in the watchable hits Coyote Ugly (2000), Serendipity (2001) and The Sum of All Fears (2002), and has portrayed Keanu Reeves’ wife in the John Wick saga since 2014.
As if that’s not enough, Moynahan—married to businessman Andrew Frankel since 2015—boasts a lovely-and-spunky personality to match. Co-star Steve Schirripa, who plays Erin’s private investigator, reports that she once brought him a portable mini-air conditioner to wear around his neck when the two were filming on the hot NYC pavement during the summer. “She is such a thoughtful person,” he says. Plus, he notes, “She is talented and smart and always steps on the set fully prepared, which is why it’s so great to have scenes with her, and even more so when she directs. She and Erin do share some terrific qualities.”
