Actress Molly Parker loves the moment when everything falls apart, when a character loses everything. “Because you're giving up on life?'' she said. “Will it just die? Or will it change?”
Parker (“Deadwood,'' “House of Cards''), 52, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer about 10 years ago. She didn't talk much about it and quickly said, “It's okay.” Dying wasn't really on the table. However, this treatment disrupted her endocrine system. Recovery took years. And that changed her, she said.
Intelligent and often maniacally intense, Parker is the rare actress who can be very hot and very cool at the same time. She seems to feel more and think more than the average woman. In her 30 years in the industry, she has typically gravitated toward the margins, such as indie films and high-end television when it was still new. (That said, she did make one Hallmark movie. It was for the money, she emphasized.)
I mean, she wasn't going to be on a network show, much less something as dizzyingly ordinary as a medical procedure. If the role had been offered to her ten years ago, she would not have considered it.
“I was only going to do indies for the rest of my life,” she said.
But when her agent sent her the script for the Fox series “Doc,” which premieres Tuesday, she read it. Yes, it was a network show. Yes, it was a procedural matter. Yes, that will mean time away from her teenage son. But she was drawn to the story of Amy Larsen, a brilliant doctor who developed retrograde amnesia after a serious car accident. In Amy, she finds another woman in a moment of crisis, another woman who chooses to survive.
I met Parker one afternoon in early December. She had traveled from Los Angeles, where she lives, to New York City for a several-day press event. But she did find an hour or two to stop by the Canadian Gallery in Chinatown. Attractive in a fur coat, her voice soft and surprisingly deep, she wandered through several rooms, admiring photo collages by Lee Mary Manning and abstract paintings by her friend Lily Ludlow. She helped raise the initial funds for the space, which was opened by friends, using a portion of her first film fee.
“The word 'investor' is a fancier word than what I was doing,” she said. “But I bought art from them, and that was how we started.”
Parker grew up in a small Canadian town outside of Vancouver, British Columbia, and spent much of her childhood studying ballet. She was accepted into a biology program at a nearby university, but instead moved to Vancouver and waited her turn to take acting classes. In 1996, she starred in the independent film Kissed, playing a necrophiliac morgue student.
“It was the most fun I've ever had,” she said.
For a decade, she bounced from one indie film to the next, partly out of snobbery and partly because no major studios were interested yet. “Maybe I was a little too intense,” she said. But she loved the life of traveling the world and making what she called “weird, bizarre, artistic films.”
She was drawn to darkness and characters in extreme situations: addicts, sex workers, women experiencing extreme loss. In her personal life, she was quiet and introverted. I could have been more expressive at work, and for a long time it felt right.
Although she appeared on the little-watched Canadian series “Twitch City,” her first major television appearance was a two-episode role as Rabbi on “Six Feet Under.” A year or two later, she auditioned for the HBO revisionist western series Deadwood, directed by David Milch. For three seasons starting in 2004, she played Alma Garrett, an opium addict with a claim on her murdered husband's money.
Timothy Olyphant, who played her lover's lawyer, recalled how easy it was to play her counterpart. “Normally with someone as good as she is, you expect there to be some drama,” he said. But there was no drama, just a seemingly effortless experience. “She had complete control of the scene, but at the same time was completely open to it going in unexpected directions,” he said.
After Deadwood was abruptly canceled, Parker tried to appear on a network show (Swingtown) but was not hired, and went on to star in Dexter and House of Cards. Years after cancer treatment, her choices have become somewhat less predictable, including the live-action version of Peter Pan and Wendy and the Netflix remake of Lost in Space.
It's still surprising that an indie-minded actress would choose to star in a network show. And even though Doc has some quirks, the show is based on an Italian series based on real-life cases of amnesiac clinicians, it still follows the mold of standard medical procedures. I'm hooked. (At one point, a character says to Parker's Amy, “You're a maverick who's always unafraid to take a chance.”)
Each episode consists of two tracks, with Amy solving medical mysteries while also grappling with the larger mystery of who she became over the years she can't remember, which excites Parker.
“She's going to find out who she is,” she said of Amy. “She can be anything.'' This is consistent with her belief that humans are inherently diverse, or, in Parker's words, “there is no limit to human eccentricity.'' was.
“Doc” takes a sharp look at Amy as a mother, lover, co-worker, friend, boss, and ex-wife. “Doc” showrunner Barbie Kligman was worried about casting someone for the role. “We needed the impossible,” she said. “This actress had to play all of these levels at the same time.” And she had to be sympathetic to Amy even though Amy said and did terrible things. . That prism contains some very hard edges. Kligman felt Parker could play all those sides and was pleased when she agreed.
Production on the show, which was filmed in Toronto in early 2024, was often exhausting. The days were long, and Parker would sometimes come home and just lie on the floor. But she loved the hard work, so she tried not to take her fatigue out on her castmates.
Amira Vann, who plays Amy's best friend and fellow doctor, praised Parker's example. “She shows up with her soul and is very generous,” Vann said. She began to release the associations that defined Parker for her. Craft. respect. joy. “
Parker is delighted. Midlife, once a death sentence for most actresses, turns out to be more expansive than expected. And she is finally completing her bachelor's degree, this time in political science.
“I'm the happiest I've ever been,” she said.
Still, happiness doesn't seem to be her driving force in life, especially in her work. The darkness and the possibilities it brings never feel far away.
“We all go through different things and we all suffer in the end,” Parker said. She was talking about Amy. She was also talking about herself. “But if you have the ability to overcome it and change, you can have a great life because you have an unrestricted perspective on life.”
