She sipped cosmos for six seasons on Sex and the City. But in Kristin Davis's latest movie, her leading man drinks from a bowl. Playing the wife of a lawyer (Tim Allen) who morphs into a sheepdog in The Shaggy Dog, Davis, 41, learned to take a licking. "It was a little scary," she says of a scene where Allen slobbers on her cheek like a pooch. "The lick got bigger on every take."

PUPPY LOVE: A pet lover who once bought her late golden retriever an exclusive membership on a prestigious jet service, "so we could fly privately," Davis is adopting a Cavalier King Charles spaniel and fostering four shelter dogs—one of whom animal welfare officials named after her Sex character—in her L.A. home. "I don't call her Charlotte," she says. "That's freaky."

STILL A CITY GIRL: "I spent New Year's with Cynthia [Nixon] and Sarah Jessica [Parker]," Davis says of her old castmates. "We're all good friends." She even bonded with Parker's 3-year-old son James Wilkie in the womb. "I'd talk to the bump," she says. "She didn't know the sex, so I called it Spud. He turned out to be much more of a James Wilkie than a Spud."

STAY OF EXECUTION: Despite heading to London to reprise her Off-Broadway role as a death-row inmate in The Exonerated, Davis isn't trying to kill her good-girl rep. "I got a script where they wanted me to play a drug dealer," she explains. "But I'm happy with my image. People like Charlotte!"

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