Booked and busy! Isaac Powell didn’t appear in any episodes of And Just Like That despite being cast as a series regular.
The 27-year-old Broadway actor “ultimately wasn’t able to do the show,” a source exclusively tells Us Weekly, citing “scheduling conflicts with another job” as the reason for Powell’s absence from the Sex and the City revival.
In July 2021, the Grammy nominee was confirmed to be joining Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis and more in the HBO Max series as George, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Production on the show began that same month.
The North Carolina native is best known for his time on the Great White Way, earning critical acclaim for his turn as Daniel in the 2017 revival of Once on This Island. Three years later, he earned the lead role of Tony in Ivo van Hove’s West Side Story. The show was forced to close early amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Though he didn’t make the final cut of And Just Like That, Powell has begun to cross over into film and TV, recently starring in the film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen. He was also featured in season 2 of Amazon Prime’s Modern Love and had a four-episode arc on American Horror Story: Double Feature.
The highly anticipated follow-up to SATC premiered in December 2021 and aired its final episode on Thursday, February 3. Throughout the series, longtime fans caught up with their old favorite characters — with the exception of Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) — and were introduced to a few new friends, including Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker). However, Powell wasn’t the only previously announced cast member who went unseen.
John Corbett, who portrayed Aidan Shaw in the original series, teased to Page Six in April 2021 that he was a big part of And Just Like That.
“I’m going to do the show,” he revealed at the time. “I think I might be in quite a few [episodes]. I like all those people, they’ve been very nice to me.”
After the 60-year-old hyped up his cameos, viewers were confused when Carrie’s old flame didn’t end up on their screens. Showrunner Michael Patrick King went on to clarify when the finale dropped that Corbett was never going to be part of the series.
“The fact of the matter is, we never said anything about Aidan. … We always try to be very restrained and look at the reality of what people are experiencing and it has nothing to do with Aidan coming or not coming,” King told Deadline on Thursday. “It really just felt like this was a lot for Carrie. This season was a lot. We wanted to get her through this and into the light — the last episode is called, ‘Seeing the Light.’ We wanted to get her out. [Aidan’s return] is a big story line that everybody at home wrote that we had never intended.”
And Just Like That is available to stream now on HBO Max.
With reporting by Diana Cooper