We tend to play a little fast and loose with the word “icon,” but when it comes to Kim Cattrall, there’s no question: The woman is iconic. And for her latest act, she’s teaming up with a titan of the beauty industry, Charlotte Tilbury, for the new Pillow Talk Beauty Soulmates campaign. After all, who better than Samantha Jones herself to front the sexiest makeup line in the biz?
“I’m having too much fun. I’m really enjoying myself,” Cattrall, 68, says of doing the boudoir-set shoot at this moment in her career. “She really puts so much confidence out there for young women,” Cattrall says of Tilbury, whose newest Pillow Talk products have a costarring role in the campaign.
The latest collection features the Pillow Talk Love Effect Matte Revolution Lipsticks, Pillow Talk Love Effect K.I.S.S.I.N.G. lip colors, and Pillow Talk Beauty Soulmates Face Palette. Cattrall admits to being drawn to the packaging, all of which is adorned with pink heart-shaped crystals: “I am a girl. I like the sparkles,” she says.
Ahead, Cattrall talks more about working on the campaign, how she learned to speak up for herself in the makeup chair early, and the beauty wisdom she picked up from her 1987 cult hit, Mannequin for Glamour’s Big Beauty Questions.
Glamour: The campaign is about being bold, beautiful, and unapologetically yourself. What does that mean to you?
Kim Cattrall: There’s a feeling when someone is being authentic because it’s coming uniquely from them. You sense that instinctually, in a kind of primal way. I think what Charlotte is trying to encourage women to do is to try something bold, to be confident enough to try something. Maybe it doesn’t work. Who cares? There’s another product that you can try. There’s another color you can try. But in [that process], you become more and more confident in finding out what you want.
The photos are gorgeous! How did you feel working on it?
It was glowing. I was glowing. I like what Charlotte does. In my toolbox, in my makeup box, I have her product. So as a sort of independent woman to another, I thought, yeah, I can get behind women feeling confident enough to mix it up.
You’ve always exuded confidence. When it comes to beauty, and makeup in particular, what makes you feel most confident?
For me, especially as I get older, less is more. When I was younger, I felt a real need to, in some ways, put up a mask of who I was or what I wanted people to perceive me as. But the older I’ve gotten and the more comfortable I’ve gotten with myself, that’s been less of a priority. Meeting people without pretense, without hiding, it takes vulnerability, but it’s worth it.
There is a vulnerability in beauty, right?
There is. People think, oh, you’re good looking. What have you got to worry about? [Laughs] Excuse me. We all are going through whatever crap in our lives and in our jobs.
What’s your personal approach to makeup?
It depends on what my day is, but on a regular basis, I just put a little bit of makeup on—lipstick, concealer for any little new friends that have appeared at night. But for my job, it’s completely different. Makeup plays such a big role in being an actress. And you literally can change who you are playing that character between takes. As an actress, to be able to access something like makeup to help me create a character is such an essential tool. Most of the parts, or a lot of the parts that I have played, are very sophisticated, smart women who know how to take care of themselves. And part of that has to do with, it’s almost like a preparation, putting the makeup on, creating that person. That is a big part of it.
Charlotte Tilbury Pillow Talk Love Effect Matte Revolution Lipstick in Love Talk
Ulta
What are the products you use every day?
My makeup bag in life is very small because most of the bags that I own are very small. So a lot of it’s lipstick, a lot of it’s powder. I have a pencil if I have a little red something popping up or whatever. And I have a little comb that folds up. It’s all easy maintenance.
Is there a beauty tip you’ve picked up on set that you’ve used ever since?
I wear a lot less makeup in real life. I remember as a young contract player at Universal Studios, I would sit in the makeup chair and I would just hate what was going on because the makeup, especially in the ‘80s, was so much. And I would go back to my dressing room because I was a little bit nervous—I didn’t want to upset the makeup artist or the hairdresser—and I would tone down my makeup and I would come to set and I’d sort of avoid the hair and makeup people.
One of the things that I learned was to stand up for myself and say, this doesn’t feel right. I want to be the most relaxed, the most comfortable. So I needed to take it down. On a set is like any workspace, so I think the lessons learned there are valuable for life because it’s about taking care of you, taking care so you can do what you need to do at the best of your ability and not letting other people get in the way.
It’s pretty amazing that really from the beginning you had that gumption to say, “This isn’t me.”
Because ultimately, I hope that I’m more interesting than a movie or a TV character that I play. I’m multidimensional. Whereas those characters are not always written that way or come across that way. So yeah, it takes confidence and it takes bravery to say, “My opinion counts. I’m the person driving this bus. This is me.”
What’s the beauty secret you swear by?
Good lighting. I always say this to people: Know your light, know where you look good. It’s priceless. Know where you look good. Look at pictures of yourself, see what you like. I remember early on when I did a film called Mannequin, they had a DP—a director of photography—and he kept saying, “three-quarter, not dead on,” and I didn’t know what he meant. He said, everybody looks better, [with their faces turned] three quarters, it just makes your face more interesting on camera. And he was right. I went to see the rushes and I thought, yeah, my face does look more interesting.
I just saw that Mannequin is kind of going viral right now on TikTok.
That movie got absolutely panned when it came out. Such a sweet, lovely little movie. I don’t know why anyone could be malicious in any way about it. It was a fairytale. The weekend it came out, it was up against a Sylvester Stallone film, which was about arm wrestling. And every film that Sylvester Stallone had ever done was number one at the box office. So I thought, well, we would be number two. And we won over Sylvester Stallone. This little movie with no big stars. Then it went to DVD and people watched it, and their kids watched it, and then their kids watched it. I would have meetings with execs at different movie studios, and they say, my favorite movie was Mannequin.
Well, that’s good. That’s what you hope for in a career in film and television, to be remembered and to entertain people. And those moments, you look back on them and you think, yeah, it was good to be part of that at the time.
Lindy Segal is a freelance lifestyle writer and editor whose work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Fast Company, InStyle, and others. She also writes the Substack newsletter “Gatekeeping.”
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