Kim Cattrall will tell you some things, but definitely not others. One thing she will tell you is that once upon a time, she was uncool. “I was a theatre geek,” she says, meaning when she was a teenager in Courtenay on Vancouver Island and spending summers at the Banff and Nelson schools of fine arts. “I’d wear bell-bottoms and tie-dye T-shirts that I did in art class. Everything was about plays and Shakespeare and classics. I wanted to play Joan of Arc. That was my thing. I didn’t really give a shit about boys much.”

What? This from the woman famous for playing Sex and the City’s libidinous Samantha, a character who possibly gives a shit about boys—well, boy toys—more than any other on-screen female ever? The woman who’s vocalized so many orgasms for film and television it’s surely some kind of record?

Watch the trailer for Meet Monica Velour.

“Well, I did date some art geeks off and on, a lot of musicians,” Cattrall says over the phone from New York, coming across warm and girly-chatty and tough simultaneously, rather like—dare one say?—Samantha. “The guy from Devo.” Yeah? Which guy? “Jerry Casale.” Uh-huh. And? “I’m not gonna tell ya.” Not even a tidbit? “No way! That’s mine!”

She will happily talk about Meet Monica Velour (which opens Friday [May 20] ), the quirky indie film in which she plays a former ’80s porn actor fallen on such hard times that she’s stripping in a cheesy club and considering a comeback flick called Bunghole Bandidos. When a teenage fanboy named Tobe (Dustin Ingram) travels across the country to find his idol, the two form an oddball relationship. The role required Cattrall to smack her pantie-clad ass on-stage to the sounds of hecklers’ Depends jokes, schlep around in a dirty, very un-Samantha bathrobe, and possibly emote an orgasm or two.

While filming, she had decided ideas about things. “They gave me bottled beer,” she says, “and I was, like, ”˜No, too expensive. Give me canned no-name beer. That’s what Monica drinks.’” Monica had other needs, too. “I got on set and the guy gives me a lighter. I said, ”˜This lighter looks like it cost 40 bucks. I need a Bic. A pink Bic lighter that you get at the grocery store.’ It’s like herding cats. I had to keep saying, ”˜No, no, no.’ Monica’s back yard was immaculate. I said, ”˜This is a trailer park.”¦Give me some beer bottles. Pizza boxes.”¦Come on! The screen door should be ripped. The kitty-litter box should be full. This should have a life!’ ”

At one point in the film, Monica grabs her bare, rather paunchy, gut, eyeballing it in the mirror. “I loved that,” Cattrall says, laughing. “That was one of those ”˜check’ moments in your life where you want to be filmed looking exactly like that. I don’t know a woman alive who hasn’t sat in front of a mirror, grabbed her gut, and said, ”˜Fuck off! Get off my body!’ It was real, you know?”

Speaking of what’s real—and not—why do all those Samantha fans who she says stop her on the street think that’s really her, you know, getting her rocks off? “Because I’m so good at it!”