Parker Posey: Not your average indie queen
Her new project may be a micro-budget auteur flick, but she finds equal satisfaction on TV and in blockbuster films
LOS ANGELES --Parker Posey doesn't pick at her lunch. She doesn't push the slab of salmon around her plate, pretending to eat. No, she takes normal-size bite after normal-size bite (although she does pass on the bread, natch). Even more than her status as indie movie queen, this action sets her apart from her acting peers.
In person, Posey is anything but an obvious icon. She's polite. She's pleasant. She's only a tad New Age artsy - fartsy and hardly over-the-top at all. Sure she's got the same super-smudged eyes of so many of the characters she's played. Yes there's that voice that can go from low-pitched gravel to grating shriek. But otherwise Posey could almost be described as sensible in her dark slacks and blazer with the hand-made wooden pin of a girl riding a dragonfly on the lapel. Were it not for her wild purple blouse, she'd come off as mainstream as some of her acting choices of late.
Posey brings that unexpected regularity to her latest role in "Fay Grim," writer-director Hal Hartley's long-awaited follow-up to 1998's "Henry Fool." The first time around, Posey played a much smaller part. This time out she stars, carrying a film full of geopolitical in trigue and marketing potential: "Fay Grim" opens in theaters Friday, and on the following Tuesday , it is being released on both HDNet Movies and DVD. Posey, now a self-described yoga addict, sounds at peace with the pressure.
"I carried 'Party Girl.' I carried 'House of Yes,' and more recently 'Broken English,' " she said without any ego in that familiar husky voice of hers. "I like it. I like getting to know the character that way. It's much easier for me than going in and doing, you know, a side character. I like it because there's a backbone to it. There's something you can lean against."
In "Fay Grim," her character goes from what Hartley describes as an "American who's well-intentioned but uninformed" to what Posey calls a woman who understands that "people do die, people are shot. The world can be ugly." Along the way, there are also laughs as Fay Grim gets pulled into the worldwide hunt for her missing husband's composition books, which might just contain secrets that could undo several Western governments. But it's the main character's transformation that matters most, and that rests on Posey, who went from struggling indie unknown to established actress in the near-decade between films.
"She does have a particular personality and she does have a certain visibility now that she didn't have before," Hartley said during an interview in LA. "She's the greatest actress who ever worked with me. She's got range, intelligence, imagination. She has no patience for the vapid. People want to do their best when they're around her."
Increasingly, the people surrounding Posey are not the starving artists associated with the world of independent film but the casts of mainstream movies, franchise sequels even ("Superman Returns," "Blade: Trinity"). She co-starred with Shirley MacLaine in a made-for-TV movie about makeup maven Mary Kay. She did an arc on "Will and Grace" and, more recently, "Boston Legal." She enjoys the pace of TV enough to have filmed a pilot a month or so ago, "The Return of Jezebel James," in which she plays a children's book editor who can't get pregnant. Hilarity in the Norman Lear vein ensues, she says.
"[Television] is where the good writing is now," Posey said. "A lot of movies don't write characters. On 'Boston Legal' with James Spader, he was like, 'How many of these independent movies can you do? You work so hard on them and then no one sees them and you don't get paid anything and you're exhausted.' He approached his work in 'Boston Legal' like, 'This is an opportunity for me as an actor to work on good material and bring everything I can to the part.' I loved watching the crew in between takes. They were so efficient and so on it. Everyone's enjoying their job and not working crazy hours and it seems so much more stable. So I enjoyed it. So we'll see if this pilot happens."
That isn't to say the New York-based Posey plans to give up her indie crown. She says she's still drawn to artists and auteurs. Any time writer-director Christopher Guest calls for one of his ad-libbed ensemble pieces ("For Your Consideration," "Best in Show") Posey says she's there. She never had any doubt she'd do "Fay Grim," or that Hartley would follow through on his promise to write the role for her. Still, Posey concedes she was thrilled and perhaps relieved to find such a fully developed female character on the page.
At 38, Posey is at the age at which many actresses start to worry -- rightly -- that career twilight is falling. But Posey insists she has no complaints. Perception to the contrary, she says she doesn't get offered every independent film that's made. She doesn't get every role she wants. Then again, she's still working -- and wanted by directors. In today's youth-obsessed Hollywood that's saying something. She's even glad to put perky behind her: "I'm a woman now. I'm playing woman roles. I certainly can't complain because I'm working. I feel very fortunate."
For her part, she says young actresses today may not be so lucky. Sounding more mother hen than indie movie oddball, Posey says she would like to see more of them get meatier roles. She says she worries for the acting generation behind her, that slasher movies aimed at teenage boys have replaced the quirky independent movies she was able to make in her 20s. The words "mass-market horror movies" are a hiss in her mouth.
"You see Hilary Swank in a horror film and you're like, 'What's going on? Shouldn't she be playing Norma Rae in some form?' which I guess she did in 'Freedom Writers.' But those parts are so rare, and it kind of worries me because there's so much merchandising going on in movies and in schools and there's MySpace and people aren't relating like they used to to film."
Posey, of course, hopes people will relate to "Fay Grim." She says she hopes its multilevel release will win over audiences who don't necessarily want to sit in a movie theater. But even after all these years, the direct pitch doesn't come easy to her. Maybe it's all that yoga. Or maybe it's that she believes so in Hartley and believes that moviegoers should, too. Here then is her non-soundbite sell for her new movie:
"It's intelligent, and it's about our times now but it's not violent. And it's funny. . . . Hal is an auteur. He's one of our great independent filmmakers. We were talking about this earlier, about how the individual artist and filmmakers aren't respected and how he deserves the respect of an artist. Not that that's why you should go see the movie, that's a tangent. But you should go see it, and the way it's being released you can see it a whole new way."
As someone still best-known for starring in the sort of arty, independent films that don't draw big box office, Posey has made her pitch. The salmon's eaten; her plate is clean. Among the Hollywood crowd, it doesn't get much odder than that.
Lynda Gorov can be reached at lgorov@aol.com. 