Good Golly Miss Molly — Molly Parker

By Trevor Cole
Originally published in Elm Street magazine, 2001



Molly Parker and I have been together for about 20 minutes, and she’s swearing out loud in a public place. In an art gallery, as a matter of fact. People milling about, gazing at large European masterpieces. Molly Parker swearing.

It’s all going according to plan.

Let’s track back for a moment. Leave Molly swearing and come with me. Now here we are, a few days earlier, at my kitchen table, as I prepare to interview Parker, a critically adored actor who has appeared in more feature length movies, for film and television, than you might expect – 35 to be precise – and who now sits on the trembling cusp of wider fame. It strikes me at this moment that the celebrity interview is strangely analogous to a first date. You have one chance to get it right, and getting it right means convincing the person granting you her time that it’s safe to relax, it’s safe to open up and be real.

In Parker’s case, the date analogy seems a particularly good fit. Though she is beautiful, her beauty resides in the realm of the plausible. There’s nothing startlingly overt or augmented about her appearance. She looks, in other words, datable. If a guy were really, really lucky.

And because of her taste in roles – from the dark, damaged women in Wayne Wang’s Center of the World and the small but shocking Lynne Stopkewich films Kissed and Suspicious River, to the sweetly comic Hope in the CBC series Twitch City – and because her performances in these roles are so astonishingly controlled and intelligent they force humility upon you, one can imagine her to be a person with a great deal to say. Which, be it for a first date or a one-shot interview, is really ideal.

The trouble with Molly Parker is that none of the interviews I’ve yet read show her saying anything remotely revealing. She speaks intelligently about her work, about her directors, about what this or that film is trying to communicate, but it’s all resolutely professional. The characteristic mystery and inaccessibility she often exudes in her films – what seems like a figurative wall she’s placed between the camera and her – comes through in every well-chosen word. You can respect me, she seems to be saying, but you cannot know me.

My task, therefore, is to find a way past her defenses, over her ramparts, through her wall, where no one (I can convince myself) has thoroughly succeeded in going before, just like a man on – yes, the date analogy is working beautifully. And does a man on a first date sit down with a smart, lovely woman and start drilling her with questions? Lord no; he distracts her with something, he gets her talking about other things. If he’s really on his game, he takes her to an art gallery.

So now here we are, Molly and I, in the Hermitage exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Molly, staying in a rented Dupont Street condominium in Toronto, is just wrapping up production on the Paul Gross film Men with Brooms, a comedy staring Gross, Parker and Leslie Nielsen about competitive curlers and the women who love them. She’s agreed to the concept of doing “something fun” together, but it’s now approaching noon – Molly arrived on foot in jeans, red suede Adidas and a tight, turtle-necked sweater, a half-hour late and charmingly apologetic, all girlish smiles and self-admonishment – and it has to be said that we have so far managed only cursory small talk. Born near Vancouver 28 years ago. Lived in Toronto for four and a half years with her boyfriend, filmmaker Matt Bissonnette. Moved to Los Angeles a while ago because that’s where the auditions happen. Sheepishly craving a cigarette. Needing a session with her chiropractor (headaches for the last eight days). Wearing a moonstone engagement ring because her middle name is Moon. Mortified by the trilling cell-phone in her purse.

As we ease further into the gallery, Molly seems friendly but enervated, pulling at the neck of her sweater. She really seems to want to focus on the paintings – she recently provided artist friends in Montreal, she says, with the money to open a small contemporary gallery, and “in exchange they’ve sort of filled my house with really great art.” So she peers in closely at all the Rubenses and the Adriaenssens and the Van Dycks, occasionally unfolding her arms to adjust her small wire-frame glasses for a clearer look, letting out little sighs of amazement and, when she must, whispering polite responses to my increasingly inane conversation starters.

Look at the light on the face in that portrait, I say, pointing to a 380-year-old oil by Anthony Van Dyck. It’s almost cinematic.

“Well,” she offers with a half smile, trying her best, “good film is framed well.” Prompted by one of my reaching attempts at a segue, from portraits to portraits of Shakespeare to “Have you done much theatre?,” she removes her glasses – suddenly her almond eyes are the most stirring sight in the room – and admits no. “I really like film,” she says softly, smiling. “It makes sense to me. I understand how it works.” Yes, this is why, after being flown to London to audition with Ralph Fiennes for Istvan Szabo, the director of Mephisto, she was picked to appear as Hannah in the three-generation Hungarian epic Sunshine. This is why Michael Winterbottom chose her, and not a British actress, to play a South Londoner in Wonderland. This is why Paul Gross wrote the part of an alcoholic single mother, the emotional centre of Men with Brooms, specifically with Parker in mind, and why this fall she’ll be seen not only in Brooms, but also in the Canada-U.K drama War Bride, as a polio-victim, and as William Hurt’s love interest in Rare Birds, a comedy set in Newfoundland. Parker fulfills her actorly duties with more diligence, grace and skill than most could ever hope to achieve. But that’s what she’s doing now, speaking in respectfully hushed tones in the AGO: fulfilling her duty. She’s not being herself. The wall, in the early going, is firmly in place.

This may partly be Lynne Stopkewich’s fault. Parker has said that her association with the Vancouver-based director has been her most satisfying creative relationship. And in the course of filming two of Parker’s most challenging roles, as the blissed-out necrophile in Kissed and the motel prostitute in the drizzly and dispiriting Suspicious River, Stopkewich not only witnessed the wall Parker can put up, she cultivated it. “I love that about her,” she says on the phone from Parker’s own Hornby Island cabin in British Columbia. “That’s a quality of hers that I really kind of cherish.” In her films, Stopkewich puts all the onus on Parker’s long, quiescent face, and says, “I’m just trying to get her to do a lot of nothing.”

Inside the AGO, the cracks begin to show as we arrive at a still-life of a table laden with fruit by Adriaen van Utrecht. Molly seems entranced. “Pomegranate,” she murmurs, pulled forward. She extends her fingers close to the painting and almost touches a little bunch of bright red cherries, “Right on the edge,” she breathes, “just about to fall.”

For some reason, this jogs loose some mental fragment shoved under my brain’s floorboards. You’re a vegetarian, I say. Right?

“No,” says Molly, “I eat most things.” Ah well, I say, I guess I’m thinking of the fact that actors in Hollywood so often starve themselves into stick figures.
“That’s not true.”

And then Molly curls off on a remarkable tangent. She knows so many people in Hollywood who are “smarter, brighter, more interesting and have more integrity” than people she meets elsewhere, and she hates the system that promotes and socializes a competitive approach to physicality. She recalls a story in the Globe and Mail a few weeks earlier that polled readers on which version of Renée Zellweger’s body they preferred – the slightly plump version in Bridget Jones’s Diary, or the underweight model in recent magazine photos.

“At a certain point,” says Molly, “I just think, you know, fuck you. Like, shut up! Who cares how you like her? Robert De Niro’s ability to fluctuate his weight apparently makes him a better actor whereas hers makes you feel that at the Globe and Mail you can turn around and do a poll about what kind of body you think she should have? Fuck you!”

Molly Parker has suddenly, briefly, become herself, and the effect is beguiling.

Don McKellar, a Canadian actor and writer who several years ago created the jaggedly comic “anti-sitcom” Twitch City for CBC, cast Parker without ever having seen her do comedy. In Vancouver, performing story-editor’s duties at a screenwriter’s workshop, he saw her reading through a script, invited her out afterward for drinks and…. He hesitates. He takes a deep breath, then he says shyly, “I sort of fell for her a bit.” It was her captivating manner, the way she laughed at his jokes, the way she seemed to get his sensibility. “I was immediately charmed.” Only later did he call the series’ director, Bruce McDonald, in a panic. “Bruce,” he said, “I’ve never seen her in anything.” In fact, though she turned out to have an impeccable comic touch, McKellar admits that if he had seen her in Kissed first, he probably wouldn’t have cast her. But as it turned out, “she’s not the way you would necessarily expect from the movies.”

It’s the wall. “Right,” he says. “She has that cold – not cold, but – cool thing.” What’s this all about, this cool reserve? In her performances, more than anything, it’s about not being afraid to show a mind at work. Parker admits that filming Suspicious River -- the soul-numbing Canadian drama in which she portrays a motel clerk who plays a kind of sexual Russian roulette – was hard for this reason: She didn’t know how to play a character who didn’t think. “I’ve never been able to play someone not as smart as me,” she says, adding quickly, “Not that I’m so smart.” But she is smart, and she’s confident in her ability to make us interested in smart women, characters who keep a slightly prickly distance because they need the mental manoeuvring room.

In real life, however, there’s something else at work. Here Parker’s wall may have more to do with self-preservation. Throughout her life, she has been someone who gives her all. As a ballet student, at eleven or twelve years old, she threw herself into dancing en pointe, and did it so doggedly that in the midst of practice, glancing at herself in the mirror, she saw a flash of red, and looked down to find her slippers soaked in blood. As a young actor, early in her career, she had a guest role on a TV series and performed a crying scene over and over, to the point of physical and emotional exhaustion. Even more remarkably, it was all done off-camera. She was trying to support another actor through her close-up. By the time it was Parker’s turn, hours later, she blanked. She had nothing left.

These days, on set, she’s still known to be a generous actor, expending a great deal of energy helping others achieve the best in their roles. But she has learned to keep something back for herself. And maybe it’s that reserve that allows her to make the choices she does, taking on roles that challenge her to expose herself, figuratively or otherwise. Not every Molly Parker movie involves her being filmed naked in troubling, horrifying scenes; it just seems that way. But because she has done it so bravely in three signature films – Center of the World, Suspicious River and Kissed – a sense of amazement, even alarm, has come to seem like the standard emotional response to a Parker performance. Don McKellar could hardly bear to watch what she goes through toward the end of Suspicious River. “It was an uncomfortable experience,” he admits. “Because I have such affection for Molly, I can’t say that I went bouncing out of that movie.” Says Robert Lantos, who produced Sunshine and Men with Brooms, “She is fearless.”

But when it comes to letting an outsider peek into her psyche to find out the whys and hows of her choices, she’s nervous. In the past, she’s shrugged off the question blandly – she chooses roles that “interest” her. And that’s as revealing as she wants to get. “I think it’s damaging to know too much about a person, about an actor,” she says, worrying that knowledge will turn the viewer’s attention to the movie’s machinery, and away from the story itself.

This is a case of a thinking actor thinking too much, intellectualizing what could merely be a profoundly private nature. Gradually though, over lunch in the AGO’s airy and slightly noisy Agora restaurant, she lets out bits of herself. She takes my tape recorder and places it in front of her, like an ice cream cone, an act of owning her self-consciousness. She’s most relaxed around the subject of food. “I love food,” she coos. “I love to cook. And I spend most of the money I make eating.” Given the chance to cook one thing, she’d bake a pie. She knows and loves fish, having grown up in and around the fish store her parents opened in the small rural town of Maple Ridge, B.C., when she was five, and where she worked as a teenager, after school and on Saturdays, gutting and cleaning alongside her younger brother, who now works as a scenic carpenter in Vancouver. In Budapest, during the filming of Sunshine, she found she couldn’t stomach the heavily sauced Hungarian dishes, but the Russian caviar was fairly cheap. “I sort of lived on that and Fanta,” she giggles.

As it happens, there’s a caviar appetizer on the menu, which we order to share, along with the fish special, for which Molly wishes wine. When the caviar arrives – five different dollops of roe, each a different colour, on tiny boiled quails eggs – she stares at it adoringly. “That’s beautiful,” she purrs. We share the first four equally, and then I absentmindedly pick up the fifth before I realize what I’m doing and freeze with it in mid air. If this were a date, I’d be cooked. We should split it, I say.

“No,” she laughs, “we’re not going to split it. You have it.” I protest further. She insists. And later, when I play back the tape, I’ll hear what I can’t hear now – a soft, tragic moan, picked up only by the proximity of the microphone, as I put the egg in my mouth.

The inner Molly Parker really surfaces only in circumstances of total confidence. Like many actors, she bears in her something fragile and insecure, and it’s the safety of close relationships that frees her to make brave choices. Murray Gibson, triangular-bearded and sandal-shod, is the co-owner of her Hornby Island cabin, which Molly purchased from her parents a few years ago when money for them became tight. She treats Gibson, who has been her publicist and friend since she was a high-school student, like a protective older brother, snuggling against him affectionately when she sees him later, outside the AGO. “I can’t imagine not having him,” she says. “I trust the guy.”

Among directors, it’s with Lynne Stopkewich that she feels safe enough to take her greatest chances. Just before filming a harrowing scene in Suspicious River, naked and surrounded by gruesome-looking men, she broke the tension by calling out in a small voice, “Um, Lynne? Could you just tell me that you really, really love me and you’re really, really glad I’m doing this for you?”

And in the comfort of a trusting relationship, she has the confidence to be fiercely demanding. This is crucial for Parker, because in her work, her intellect must be served. “She really has to know why, about everything,” says Stopkewich. “Why do you want to tell this story, what is the story about, what are the themes, what is the subtext?” And there are no niceties involved, because that would compromise the process. In fact, frankness may be Parker’s ultimate expression of trust. “It’s great,” she says, “to work with someone you can yell at.”

But at lunch, across the table, she anxiously ties and unties her hair. She presses her fingers to her lips. She refuses my requests to speak to her family. “I’m not interested in including them in this process,” she says warily. She admits that watching her boyfriend’s home videos of her – part of an ongoing project -- is far more difficult than watching a performance on film, because the videos are real. “I still don’t look like what I think I look like,” she says plaintively. “I don’t sound like what I think I sound like. I’m not who I think I am.” And in an interview, even one focused entirely on her, the last thing she wants to talk about is herself.

“I say everything I have to say in the work,” she insists. “So I don’t have any at all kind of desire or need to sit here and tell you what I happen to think about anything. It’s not really very important to me. I will try to be clear and as honest as I can be, but not at the risk of my privacy. And not at the risk of my work.” Every statement she makes comes softened with a smile or a soft chuckle; she is at all times entirely winsome. But there’s no doubt that her wall will crumble only so far. And maybe that’s as direct a statement about herself as Molly Parker can make.

“Are we fighting now?” she giggles and leans toward the tape recorder. “We’re having a fight now.”

Yes, and it’s kind of wonderful.