Nicole Ari Parker wants to tell me a story about who she really is. What's underneath the 20-plus years of piecemeal journeywoman roles and now, at 52, those gigantic "And Just Like That ..." billboards.

She wants to explain how a breathtakingly beautiful actress married for 18 years to the impossibly gorgeous actor Boris Kodjoe doesn't really do the La La Land thing — red carpets, flash bulbs, TMZ, bleh. In her own words, Parker was "late to the party," slow to recognize how the Hollywood chessboard worked because really she wanted to play a different game.

"I'm really a theater actress. That's my passion, my dream, my training," said Parker, who is reprising her role as the uber cool Upper East Sider Lisa Todd Wexley, the answer to the question "Where are all the Black people?" on HBO's "Sex and the City" postscript.

So here's the story. Nearly a decade ago, Parker was sitting across from a famous director who was mounting an all-Black revival of a hallowed slice of American letters. The veteran actress was nervous. For years she'd longed to sink her teeth into the playbooks she'd studied at New York University — Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry and, of course, Tennessee Williams.

"I'm so excited ... like beyond," recalled Parker, who added that her full-body buzz was less about actually landing a role in the production being mounted and more about the fact that "that somebody wanted to talk to me about my craft." A craft she'd been deep into for decades but still didn't feel particularly challenged by, just yet. The meaty roles? They were few.

After a three-hour lunch that she had been warned would be "45 minutes max," theater director Emily Mann asked Parker, who by then was best known for her turn as the exacting Teri Joseph in the excellent Showtime family drama "Soul Food," a make-or-break question: Was she a Blanche or more of a Stella?

To deliver her next line, Parker removes her movie-star sunglasses and leans across her lobster Cobb at this fancy Hudson Yards eatery, glances around conspiratorially and lowers her voice just enough to make anyone listening tilt forward, too.

"And I looked at her and said, 'Emily, I could play Stanley.'"

After sitting across from her for just over an hour, it's hard not to believe her. On screen, Parker got trapped in a pattern of type — ingenue, wife of, up-and-coming grand dame, a tough but beautiful lawyer thrown in on occasion. In person, she is both fantastical and familiar. Her intense hazel gaze can seem otherworldly, but the way her voice often reaches into her Baltimore roots is very around the way. She can go on deep tangents about how Judy Garland in "A Star is Born" is a master class and insist you watch that famous dressing room scene in its entirety, post haste. To borrow an apt cliché, she is much more than meets the eye.

Mann was bowled over.

"She and I just looked into each other's eyes and sort of fell in love," the director said of that first sit down. On the drive home Parker got a text: The part of Blanche DuBois in Mann's 2012 multiracial production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" was hers.

The role was a dream fulfilled, but the reviews were lukewarm. The New York Times's theater critic wasn't impressed with actress's take on "the breakable Blanche Dubois." But Parker always meant to play the quietly cunning Southern belle as anything but simpering, describing the elder DuBois sister as a mental poker player. "I've never seen Blanche played like that until Nicole got a hold of her. I think its one of the great performances of that role," said Mann.

"I just felt like I had done my job," said Parker of the play's three-month run. "Ben Brantley made it seem like it was a hot mess. But ask anybody Black. He didn't understand that Black people laugh when something is real."

For Parker, 2012 was "a magical year." But magic doesn't always mean more — more work, more success, more respect.

"If I were more aggressive about my professional expansion, if I'd had better management, or a better publicist, or a better makeup artist or better this ... " said Parker before adding bluntly, "If I were White, I would have gone from ('Streetcar') to this to that to this." Instead, she took the road often traveled by actresses of color. After exiting stage left as Blanche DuBois with her back ramrod straight, Parker spent the next decade doing more episodic TV, including four seasons of "Empire," and the occasional film. Undoubtedly nice work if you can get it, but she was still on the hunt from something juicy.

Her husband, Kodjoe, who proposed to Parker on a mountain in his native Germany after the pair met on the set of "Soul Food," has been watching from the wings.

"I think she has only just scratched the surface because I know how good she is," said Kodjoe, who stars in the ABC drama "Station 19."

"The problem is oftentimes, especially with Black actresses, they are sort of confined to the parameters with which they're seen by mostly White writers. I've been wishing and praying that she would have some of the opportunities that her female White counterparts get on a daily basis," said Kodjoe.

Then, while Parker was shooting a new pilot in a Brooklyn warehouse with director Malcolm D. Lee, who'd previously cast her as an exotic influencer in "The Best Man: The Final Chapters," Parker spent a hurried lunch break auditioning for one of two Black roles on "AJLT." When the show premiered in 2021 to mixed reviews but a still-ravenous fan base, Parker, who had been beloved by Black audiences for decades, suddenly found herself thrust into a new kind of stardom. Articles enamored of Parker's effortlessly cool and crazy rich LTW declared that the actress had been "catapulted to fame."

Ahem.

This is why starting with "And Just Like That ..." feels wrong. Although the level of global fame the actress is attaining now is definitely new (that type of microscope is reserved for the 1 percent of performers), Parker is decidedly not. New, that is.

"It's a little bit of Christopher Columbus going on," said Parker in a high-pitched voice, laughing at the idea that she's been discovered at 50-plus but also kind of getting it.

Parker's LTW was the first of the added characters to be leaked before the show's 2021 premiere, and fresh on the heels of a so-called national racial reckoning, some assumed the actress was Kim Cattrall's "woke" replacement. Opinions ensued. Folks accused the show, which had long been criticized for being blindingly White in a multicultural metropolis, of swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction. The additional actresses of color didn't help dilute the criticism. An oft-cited tweet pointed out that Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) each got "their own emotional support woman of color."

"I stepped into a juggernaut. These fans are not playing games. They've got stuff they need to say to you. They are waiting for you outside. It's like a whole world. I got a lot of unsolicited commentary about what they liked and didn't like," said Parker, who was shocked by how triggering the cast announcements were. "People were coming out of their faces." But she did admit that the first season had a lot of work to do introducing four new characters. Season two, Parker said, feels less heavy-handed, allowing the characters to simply exist in the "SATC" universe without excessive explanation.