Yahoo Lifestyle Molly Parker Revisits Deadwood, Swingtown, House of Cards, Lost in Space and Other Roles, Previews Her Shift as Fox’s Amnesic Doc
Molly Parker’s titular Doc in Fox’s new medical drama may be blanking on recent history, but the Canadian actress’ memory is perfectly fine when it comes to revisiting past TV roles — as she does below, in TVLine’s Memories From the Set feature.
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In Fox’s Doc, based on Italy’s Doc: Nelle tue mani and premiering Tuesday at 9/8c, Parker scrubs in as Dr. Amy Larsen, a hard-charging Chief of Internal Medicine who, following a car accident, cannot remember the past eight years of her life — including but not limited to the facts that she and her doctor husband Michael (played by The Affair‘s Omar Metwally) are now divorced, she is now sneaking off for hook-ups with younger colleague Jake (Queen of the South‘s Jon Ecker), or that arch rival Richard (Party of Five‘s Scott Wolf) did a very bad, potentially career-ending thing… that only Amy had been witness to.
What drew Parker to the network series was the role of a woman “who we kind of meet in the moment when she loses everything, when her life falls apart” after the accident, she tells TVLine. Through flashbacks “we see who she is before and after,” Parker says; throw in the fact that Amy, who had become icy and unforgiving, is back to being a warmer version of herself, and “she’s really two or three or four different people sometimes, and that’s great, fun actor stuff to play.”
Wrapped around the memory-loss issue and Amy’s mission to “reintegrate” herself into a life now unfamiliar to her “are the medical drama elements that people love about the genre,” Parker assures. “It has the juicy love triangle and the weekly medical illness and high stakes, all that stuff.
“I’ve never done anything like this, and it wasn’t something I was looking to do, but when I read the script I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman,” the actress adds.
What sort of roles has Parker previously done in her career? Here, she shares some Memories From the Set of Deadwood, Swingtown and other shows.
TITANIC
This two-night CBS miniseries premiered in November 1996 — one year before that Leo-and-Kate movie. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Peter Gallagher played star-crossed lovers, while Parker filled the role of Eva Marie Saint’s “very shy” granddaughter. Recalling why she signed on for the mini, Parker tells TVLine, “I had done an independent film (Kissed) that I was really, really excited about, but it took them, like, two years to finish it and I was a super broke actress.” By doing Titanic, “I was going to make just enough money to fly myself to the premiere of this indie film that I did, which ended up going to [multiple film festivals]. And it was out of that film that I had a career that was more international.”
And yes, there would be confusion about whether Parker’s character crossed paths with Rose and Jack. “For many years, people were like, ‘Who were you in Titanic?!’ And I was like, ‘I was not on that Titanic.”
TWITCH CITY
This CBC sitcom about “a guy who was agoraphobic and addicted to Jerry Springer-type reality shows” marked Parker’s first comedy — “and almost my last!” she notes. “I’m kidding, but I very rarely get cast in comedies. I often end up playing, you know, the mother of dead children, but Twitch City was so fun, so wacky.” Parker’s Hope “was the most earnest, Pollyanna-esque character,” and she shared an apartment with Don McKellar’s aforementioned TV addict, though “shared” may be a generous interpretation. “She lived with roommates,” Parker recalls, “and her bedroom was the closet.”
DEADWOOD
On the acclaimed HBO Western, Parker played Alma, a member of New York high society who relocated to the titular South Dakota town with husband Brom — only to eventually find herself on her own, far from home. “The first time I met [series creator] David Milch was in the audition and I had one scene…,” she warmly remembers. “I don’t remember what was said, but I remember leaving thinking, ‘Oh, I love that man. I want to work with him.’ There was something about David in that he had this ability to really see you, to really understand who people are. He has a deep understanding of human nature.”
Milch also had a knack for crafting story in real time. “He would write a scene, you would perform it, he would watch, and then he would go back and write the next scene,” she shares. “It wasn’t that he didn’t know what that next scene needed to do, but it was always informed by the thing that he had just watched you do. There was a collaboration there — not that you would talk about character together so much as he would give you something, you would do something with it, he would write off of that — which was so fulfilling. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. Very unique.”
And an experience to be revisited, in the future….
SWINGTOWN
Parker agrees that this 1970s-set, summertime CBS sudser about swinging marrieds (played by Lana Parrilla and Grant Show) and the new neighbors (Parker and Jack Davenport) that move in and learn of their “open” arrangement is a poster child for #GoneTooSoon, one-and-done TV shows.
“It was just in the wrong place,” she shrugs. “It was CBS at a time when, you know, that was not what CBS did, though I think it was courageous of them to try it in the first place.” It was also a show waylaid by the 2007-08 Writers Guild strike, in that “we shot the pilot, and then like eight months went by until we shot the rest of the season,” Parker notes.
Parker posits that if the sexually librated sudser had come along “five, seven years later, it would have been on Netflix.” But back in 2008, original streaming series “didn’t exist, so there was no real place for it.”
THE FIRM
NBC’s adaptation of the John Grisham novel, set 10 years after the Tom Cruise/Jeanne Tripplehorn film, found Josh Lucas (Sweet Home Alabama) and Parker inheriting the roles of Harvard-educated lawyer Mitch McDeere and his wife Abby.
Parker’s memories of the short-lived, tepidly reviewed endeavor are… far from firm.
“I mean, I remember doing it, certainly…,” she says, her voice trailing off. “It was a bit tough.”
HOUSE OF CARDS
Upon joining the acclaimed Netflix drama in Season 2, back when original streaming series were still a novel idea, Parker says, “My joke was like, ‘I’m an Internet actor now!’” In fact, she recalls being invited to a Netflix party “to celebrate 50 million subscribers,” when today the streaming giant is closing in on 300 million.
Parker played Jackie Sharp, a congresswoman from California who succeeded Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood as majority whip, and later sought the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
“Fantastic” is the word Parker first latches onto to sum up the experience. Elaborating, she says, “You know what the big difference was? Beau Willimon was the writer, and he was given so much agency. [Netflix] was such a different company to work for, because there weren’t a million execs with lots and lots of notes and opinions. I mean, I’m sure he got notes and I’m sure there were opinions, but what one felt there as an actor was that there was a high degree of trust in the people making the show, and that was so different. HBO was really the only other place that felt like that.”
GOLIATH
For this Prime Video drama, “We shot it in L.A. which is, like, still unheard of,” Parker marvels. “I think that in my entire career, and in the 25 years that I’ve actually lived in L.A., I’ve worked here three times! So that was a dream, to drive to Gower Studio and then drive home.”
Academy Award winners Billy Bob Thornton and William Hurt played Billy and Donald, the founding partners of a Santa Monica law firm. Parker played Callie, a lawyer who was once involved with Donald.
Parker remembers Thornton as being “just so smart and cool and phenomenal to work with… a really interesting man.” Hurt, meanwhile, she had done a movie with about 15 years prior. “He wasn’t the easiest man in the world to work with…,” she acknowledges, “but I have a tremendous fondness for him.”
Parker “loved” playing Callie “because she was so nasty.” As she explains, “One of the things you do as an actress, especially when you’re younger, is you play the emotional center of a man’s story — you’re the wife or the girlfriend or the mother or whoever. So it was such a relief and joy to play a person who had no emotional baggage that she had to sort through every day! It was so nice to be unapologetically powerful.”
LOST IN SPACE
Netflix’s splashy reboot of the 1960s sci-fi series “was a tremendous experience” and “one that gave me a lot of courage to say yes to things” she otherwise might not, Parker shares. “I wasn’t looking to do a remake of Lost in Space — that wasn’t the agenda — but I loved working for Netflix [on House of Cards] and I trusted that in a way.”
As mom, wife and aerospace engineer Maureen Robinson (the role played by June Lockhart back in the day), “I got to play this heroine who was sort of an action star, in my mid-40s, and that just was hilarious,” the actress raves. “Like, it was completely unexpected and really fun.”
Oh, and as a bonus: “I met my husband [Sam McCurdy] there — he was a cinematographer on the show,” Parker smiles.
DEADWOOD: THE MOVIE
After years of rumors and rumblings, few thought that cameras on the Deadwood revival movie would ever start rolling. Cast included. “I didn’t think it was going to happen,” Parker says, chuckling. “Even as we were doing it!” But it did, premiering on HBO some 13 years after the original series ended.
Setting foot on those familiar sets, Parker says it wasn’t so much like slipping back on an old shoe, but “stepping into an alternate reality that had been there the whole time.”
How so? Grab a Kleenex….
“I walked onto set, this street built on Gene Autry’s ranch, which had been there ever since we made the show, and as I stepped into one of the sets and looked down…. It was just weird, like, the floor was the same floor, and I just burst into tears. And I couldn’t stop,” she recalls. “It was so unlike me, like I am not that person. I was trying to pull it together when somebody came in the door behind me — I was like, ‘I just need a second’ — and it was Tim [Olyphant, who plays Seth], who I hadn’t seen yet. I said, ‘I don’t know what happened, I was fine when I walked in here….’ And he said, ‘And then you saw the floor.’
“There was nothing particularly special about that floor,” Parker states, “but it felt like walking into a past that somehow had been there all along, and these characters were there all along living a weird, parallel life. It was unbelievable.”
Getting the Deadwood movie done required a bit of “time travel” on Parker’s part, as she juggled two very different roles.
“I was busy doing Lost in Space [Season 2], and they wouldn’t give me any time off, so I literally would finish [Lost in Space in Alberta, Canada] on a Friday, get on a plane, show up in L.A. on Saturday morning, work Saturday and Sunday on [Deadwood], and then go back and start work again on Lost in Space on Monday,” she details. “I was exhausted, but I was almost too busy to acknowledge how intense an experience it might be…. I don’t know that I have the words to describe how profoundly strange and kind of magical it was.”
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