October 2003
"On screen you simply can’t take your eyes off her", a casting director once said of actress Molly Parker. If you can get past her accident-causing good looks, you will notice Parker exhibits an acute awareness on screen: like she understands her part better than anyone else. But even without the visuals, Parker is just as captivating — if not more so. During a recent hour-and-a-half phone interview from her Los Angeles home, I spoke with this stunningly articulate Vancouver B.C. native about everything from gardenias and Truth to her new project for HBO and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Raised in Pitt Meadows, Parker studied ballet from the age of three. This, and three years with the Royal Winnipeg ballet, had her perfectly poised for a career in dance; Parker chose acting. She immersed herself in Vancouver’s Gastown Actors’ Studio with Mel Tuck and now, with two Genies tucked away and numerous nominations for other independent films, she is in demand from London to Budapest. She has acted alongside Hillary Swank, William Hurt, John Cusack and Ralph Fiennes. Her movie credits include Wonderland, Sunshine, Max, The Center of the World, Pure, Rare Birds and Men with Brooms, which enjoyed the largest box office take in Canadian cinema history for a Canadian film.
Parker doesn’t say anything without thinking about it long and hard first. When she does speak she is a meticulous revisionist, crafting and recasting her thoughts. Describing David Milch, the writer/creator behind her latest acting project (and NYPD Blues and Hill Street Blues), she pauses, ponders, then delivers: “At the risk of sounding obscenely effusive I think he’s a genius, or at least the custodian of some kind of talent that is quite extraordinary.”
Parker’s current project, the brainchild of Milch, is a new series for HBO called Deadwood. Named after a real town in the Black Hills of South Dakota, it forms the backdrop for the 1870s gold rush. Set the same year that American cavalry officer Colonel George Custer was massacred at Little Bighorn, Deadwood is the antithesis of Victorian London — think Jane Austen on acid and you’ll have a clearer picture. Parker plays Alma Garret, a laudanum addict and wife to a rich New York dilettante who has delusions of striking it rich and making a name for himself in Deadwood. Alma’s husband is consumed by the violent town and murdered. Finding herself unfettered by marriage and the moral severity of New York society, Alma loosens her corset in a town that has no rules. ”There is suddenly an opportunity for Alma to do something different,” Parker enthuses about her character, “to be something different, to essentially become a real person.”
