Mr. Big tormented Carrie through six seasons under the protection of a false moniker, and that’s originally how producers intended things to end. Mr. Big was Mr. Big.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Michael Patrick King explained that he wanted to give Carrie a happy ending with Mr. Big without ever identifying him, but some spirit possessed him at the last second. A Name From The Muse!
“In the last episode, in the last moment, I realized [I had] to say Mr. Big’s name and I just [mimes typing on a keyboard] ‘John,’” King tells EW. “And then I told all the writers and they were like, ‘What the hell?’ And I was like, ‘We have to say his name because now he’s real!’”
Now he’s real. John. The realest name you can imagine and not at all something they call corpses no one can identify in the morgue.
King says in his mind, Mr. Big had always been “Mr. Big,” and when he suddenly vomited out “John” it was because he wanted to give him the most “generic, American, Pilgrim name” he could come up with.
“There’s no spin,” he says, “It’s just John,” adding, “It was just one of those things where it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s happening right now’ and you didn’t plan it.”
Can you believe we almost missed out on this reveal?