Every so often a piece of television casting turns out to be an actual rescue story wearing a costume, and the fastest way to miss it is to file it under celebrity news.
So: yes, Sarah Jessica Parker adopted the kitten from And Just Like That. The more interesting fact is the one underneath it. That kitten was not a hired animal performer flown in from a Hollywood agency. He was in foster care with a shelter in Connecticut, and the reason he ended up on a Manhattan set at all is that fostering, done well, puts young animals in the middle of real life instead of a kennel.
The kitten on screen
In the show’s second season, Carrie Bradshaw, a character who spent decades pointedly not being a pet person, gets a cat. The path there is characteristically roundabout. Che, having watched their sitcom collapse and having retreated into a fog of self-pity, goes back to working at the veterinary office where they worked before the comedy career took off. A future love interest turns up at that office with a batch of kittens. Carrie leaves with one and names him Shoe.
By the finale, as Carrie holds a farewell dinner in the apartment she is finally leaving, she introduces the kitten to everyone. He is asleep in one of her shoes. It is, for a show that has made some genuinely inexplicable choices, an unusually well-earned joke.
Viewers noticed. The writer Evan Ross Katz named the kitten his favorite character of the season, and the comment section largely agreed, with several people making the same observation: you cannot fake the chemistry between an actor and an animal that comfortable. Parker, replying to Katz on her own post, agreed with him.
The kitten off screen
The cat’s real name is Lotus. He and his siblings were rescued as newborns and given botanical names by the Connecticut Humane Society, which is where the whole thing starts.
CHS put it plainly on their own Facebook page: some pets get unusually exciting foster homes, and little Lotus got to spend his on the set of And Just Like That in Manhattan. That is the actual mechanism. A shelter kitten, too young to be adopted out, needed a foster placement. He got one that happened to be attached to a television production. He was on a set because he was in foster care, not the other way around.
The Parker-Broderick household made it official, adopting him in April 2023. Parker announced it publicly at the end of August. Lotus joined Rémy and Smilia, the cats she and Matthew Broderick adopted in May 2022, in a house that also includes a dog, Kissy, and has over the years included Gemmy and, going back to when the couple first met, Broderick’s dog Sally.
And, per the shelter, Lotus enjoyed the attention enough that he stayed on the show.
Why this is the actual story
Here is the thing worth taking away from a piece of celebrity fluff.
The single hardest thing a shelter has to do with neonatal kittens is keep them alive and socialized until they are old enough to be adopted. Kittens raised in a cage are more fearful, slower to bond, and harder to place. Kittens raised in a home, around noise and strangers and normal chaos, become the confident, lap-sitting cats people actually want.
Lotus was confident on a working television set surrounded by cameras, lights, and a crew of strangers. That did not come from casting. It came from being a foster kitten instead of a shelter kitten.
The show, incidentally, has always had a decent record on this front. The original series gave Miranda a cat, Fatty. Steve had a dog named Scout, memorable enough that he named his bar after him. Carrie famously lost Aidan’s dog, Pete, while she was having an affair with Big, an episode that has aged into an unintentional character indictment. Charlotte had her King Charles Spaniel, Elizabeth Taylor, and now has Richard Burton, a British Bulldog she is determined to make internet-famous.
But Shoe is the first one who came out of a shelter foster program in real life and went home with the person holding him on camera.
If you have ever looked at a fostering application and thought that it seemed like a lot, that is the pitch. You are not babysitting. You are the reason a kitten grows up unafraid of people.
References
- Connecticut Humane Society. Foster a pet.
- ASPCA. Fostering a cat or kitten.
- Alley Cat Allies. Socializing kittens.
