\n<\/p>\n
The actress Molly Parker likes the moment when it all falls apart, when a character loses everything. \u201cBecause, do you just give up on life?\u201d she said. \u201cDo you just die? Or do you change?\u201d<\/p>\n
Parker (\u201cDeadwood,\u201d<\/a> \u201cHouse of Cards\u201d<\/a>), 52, had thyroid cancer about a decade ago. She doesn\u2019t speak about it often, and she is quick to say that she is fine now. Dying was not really on the table. But the treatment did disturb her endocrine system. The recovery took years. And it changed her, she said.<\/p>\n Cerebral, with an often febrile intensity, Parker is the rare actress who can run both very hot and quite cool. She seems to feel more than the average woman and to think more, too. In her 30 years in the business, she has typically gravitated toward its margins \u2014 indie films, prestige television when prestige television was new. (That said, she has made one Hallmark movie<\/a> \u2014 for the money, she stressed.)<\/p>\n Which is to say, she was not looking to star in a network show, let alone something as blindingly normal as a medical procedural. If the role had been offered to her 10 years ago, she wouldn\u2019t have considered it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI was only going to do indies for the rest of my life,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n But when her agents sent her the scripts for \u201cDoc,\u201d<\/a> a Fox series that premieres on Tuesday, she read them. Yes, it was a network show. Yes, it was a procedural. Yes, it would mean time away from her teenage son. Yet she was drawn to the story of Amy Larsen, a brilliant doctor who gets retrograde amnesia after a serious car accident. In Amy, she found another woman at a moment of crisis, another woman who would choose to survive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I met Parker on an afternoon in early December. She had traveled from Los Angeles, where she lives, to New York City for a couple of days of press events. But she had found an hour or two to stop by Canada gallery<\/a> in Chinatown. Glamorous in a fur coat, her voice soft and surprisingly low, she wandered the few rooms, admiring some photo collages by Lee Mary Manning and abstract paintings by Lily Ludlow, a friend. She had helped to fund the space, opened by friends of hers, in its early days, using some of her first movie paychecks.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Investor\u2019 is a fancier word than what I was doing,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I bought art from them, and that was how we started.\u201d<\/p>\n Parker was raised in a small Canadian town outside Vancouver, British Columbia, and spent much of her childhood studying ballet. Although she was accepted into the biology program at a nearby college, instead she moved to Vancouver, waiting tables and taking acting classes. In 1996, she starred in the indie film \u201cKissed,\u201d<\/a> playing a necrophiliac mortuary student.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt was the most fun I\u2019ve ever had,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n For a decade, she went from one indie film to the next, partly out of snobbery, partly because the big studios weren\u2019t yet interested. \u201cI was maybe a little too intense,\u201d she said. But she liked the life, traveling all over the world making what she called \u201cweird, weird, arty films.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She was drawn to darkness, to characters in extremis \u2014 addicts, sex workers, women undergoing extreme loss. In her private life, she was quiet, introverted to a fault. At work she could be more expressive, and for a long time that felt right.<\/p>\n Although she appeared in a little-seen Canadian series, \u201cTwitch City,\u201d her first major television role was a two-episode arc as a rabbi in \u201cSix Feet Under.\u201d<\/a> A year or two later she auditioned for \u201cDeadwood,\u201d<\/a> David Milch\u2019s revisionist Western series for HBO Beginning in 2004, she spent three seasons as Alma Garret, a laudanum addict in possession of her murdered husband\u2019s gold claim.<\/p>\n Timothy Olyphant<\/a>, who played her lawman love interest, recalled how easy it was to act opposite her. \u201cUsually someone as good as she is, you expect there to be some drama,\u201d he said. But there was no drama, only a seeming effortlessness. \u201cShe was both in complete control of the scene and at the same time completely open to it going somewhere unexpected,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After \u201cDeadwood\u201d was abruptly canceled, Parker tried on a network show (\u201cSwingtown\u201d)<\/a>, but it didn\u2019t take, and she had roles in \u201cDexter\u201d and \u201cHouse of Cards.\u201d In the years after her cancer treatment, her choices \u2014 which included a live-action \u201cPeter Pan & Wendy\u201d<\/a> and the Netflix remake of \u201cLost in Space\u201d<\/a> \u2014 became somewhat less predictable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That an actress of her indie proclivities would choose to head a network show still comes as a surprise. And if \u201cDoc\u201d has a few idiosyncrasies \u2014 the show is based on an Italian series, which is based on a real-life case of a clinician with amnesia \u2014 it is still very much in the mold of a standard medical procedural. (At one point a character tells Parker\u2019s Amy: \u201cYou\u2019ve always been a maverick unafraid to take chances.\u201d)<\/p>\n Each episode runs on two tracks as Amy solves medical mysteries while also contending with the larger mystery of who she became in the years she can\u2019t remember, which excited Parker.<\/p>\n \u201cShe gets to discover who she is,\u201d she said of Amy. \u201cShe can be anything.\u201d This corresponded to her belief that humans are naturally multifarious, or as Parker put it, \u201cThere\u2019s no limits to how weird people are.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDoc\u201d views Amy prismatically \u2014 as a mother, a lover, a co-worker, a friend, a boss, an ex-wife. Barbie Kligman, the showrunner of \u201cDoc,\u201d had worried about casting someone to play this. \u201cWe needed the impossible,\u201d she said. \u201cThis actress had to play all those levels at the same time.\u201d And she had to make Amy sympathetic even as Amy says and does terrible things; that prism includes some very hard edges. Kligman felt that Parker could play all of those facets and was delighted when she agreed.<\/p>\n Making the show, which was shot in early 2024 in Toronto, was often exhausting. The days were long, and Parker would sometimes come home and just lie on the floor. But she liked the hard work, and she tried not to take her tiredness out on her castmates.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Amirah Vann, who plays Amy\u2019s best friend, a fellow doctor, appreciated the example Parker set. \u201cShe shows up soulfully, and she\u2019s very generous,\u201d Vann said. She began to free associate words that defined Parker for her: \u201cHeart. Craft. Respect. Joy.\u201d<\/p>\n Parker does feel joy. Middle age, which used to be a death warrant for most actresses, has proved more expansive than expected. And she is finally finishing that undergraduate degree she abandoned, this time in political science.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m the happiest I\u2019ve ever been,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Still, happiness doesn\u2019t seem to be what drives her, in her life or especially in her work. The darkness and the possibilities that darkness offers never feel too far away.<\/p>\n \u201cWe all go through stuff and everyone suffers eventually,\u201d Parker said. She was talking about Amy. She was also talking about herself. \u201cBut if you have the capacity to get through that and change, then you\u2019ve got a great life because you have a perspective on your life that is not limited.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n