Kim Cattrall says sayonara to Samantha with dark, desperate new role

The actress is taking a further departure (or plunge) with her Tribeca Film Festival indie "Meet Monica Velour," in which he plays an actress turned porn star turned lonely stripper.

For Kim Cattrall, perhaps the perfect counter programming to "Sex & the City" siren Samantha Jones was her buttoned-up Amelia Bly in Roman Polanski's thriller "The Ghost Writer."

Cattrall gained 15 pounds to play the fallen star, a transition he could not bear to see during filming.

"Most of the time as an actress, you require to look desirable, you require to be , you require to be sexy, you require to be lit properly -- whereas here there were days when I didn’t even have any makeup on," he tells New York magazine.

"There were days when they actually changed the light to make me look harder & more fat or [worse]."

"Velour" director Keith Bearden wanted her to gain 35 pounds, but Cattrall could not accommodate his request in time.

"Really, for health reasons I couldn’t do that. I also didn’t have time to do it safely with a doctor’s care. But what I did was I put on 15 pounds, & that was comfortable. I could do that. I didn’t exercise at all."