One January morning, I arrived at the East Village studio of a “sound facilitator,” prepared to heal. The facilitator introduced himself as Gary. He led me past a refrigerator cloaked in an Indian tapestry and into an emptied living room, where I found Parker Posey perched cross-legged on a mat, facing a row of gongs. She appeared cozy and at ease, as if she had known the gongs for many years. Posey had invited me there to experience a sound bath, a New Age therapy that she first tried in Thailand, where she filmed the third season of the HBO anthology series “The White Lotus.” During a sound bath (according to Gary’s website), various chimes and bowls are played in an intentional therapeutic sequence; the treatment may uplift the spirit, release stuck energies and rouse engagement with the surrounding environment. Or it may not, but Gary seemed nice anyway.
I joined Posey on the floor. The room filled with sounds that resembled the wait music for a planetarium. Gary then advised us that we were approaching the first full moon of the year, which he called “the wolf moon.” Posey turned to face me with spooked eyes, her mouth pulled into an arc of wry expectation. Then she stretched her legs high in the air, laid flat on the mat, and piled a sweater atop her face.
Ninety minutes later, the two of us burst onto the street as if from a saloon door. When I arrived at the appointment, we were both wearing flowy black pants and black sweaters, and I was pleased I had guessed the correct attire for our encounter. But by the time we left, she had applied her Parker Posey costume over the base layer: earrings like glass shards, a pearl hair clip in the shape of a vine-picked berry, a slippery high-necked plaid overshirt, a prismatic silk scarf and a pair of round rose-tinted glasses. We walked in woozy circles around the village. Occasionally she produced her phone and waved its digital map in front of us as if it were a homing device. Whatever had happened up in Gary’s studio — brain-wave entrainment, or maybe just a permission structure for taking a film-length nap — my spirit was in fact uplifted, and Posey was engaged with her surrounding environment.
To walk alongside Posey is to be reminded that a New York City sidewalk is a habitat still teeming with life. “Ha ha ha HA,” she said as we closed in on a poodle in a little sweater. “Yeah, I speak poodle!” she trilled to another. Manhattan’s pedestrians typically navigate its steroidal landscape in a dissociative state, but with Posey, every poodle is acknowledged, every commotion registered. A car drove up beside us and stopped at a light, blasting an accordion-forward Latin track. “I love this song!” she screamed to its occupants, craning her head toward the open window. Once she squatted on the sidewalk to greet a familiar dog, then crept over to retie both of my sneakers in double knots. “That was so fun, tying your shoelaces,” she said as she sprang up. “I’m a little mommy.”
In the coming weeks, whenever I told anyone that I was profiling Parker Posey, they invariably had a story about her impish appearance in their own life. A journalist colleague said that as she reported to work on Sept. 12, 2001, Posey drifted past her, roller-skating through Lower Manhattan. Seemingly everyone below 14th Street has had a pleasant encounter with her at a dog run. Walton Goggins, Posey’s friend and co-star in “The White Lotus,” told me that when he first met her, at a friend’s barbecue in the Catskills, he felt instantly drawn into her world. “She has this fairylike quality about her,” he said. “She’s a person capable of doing what Emerson said so long ago — to see the miraculous in the common. And she uses phrases like, Isn’t that a gas?” Natasha Rothwell, who plays the weary spa manager, Belinda, on “The White Lotus,” said in an email that when Posey first approached her on set, Posey said she had lost her wallet and had just said a prayer to Saint Anthony, before asking Rothwell if she wanted to be her neighbor at the hotel. “She then gave me a hug and seemed to float away.”
In the 1990s, the first decade of her acting career, Posey worked with just about every hot independent filmmaker, among them Richard Linklater, Noah Baumbach, Hal Hartley, Greg Motolla, Daisy von Scherler Mayer and Christopher Guest. She was so good in little movies that she became a big deal. The San Francisco Chronicle called her “the first actress to emerge as a household name on the basis of independent films.” As she became synonymous with independent movies, she came also to represent the independent woman. She had a spry intelligence, a languid posture and a screwball heroine’s timing. She had cat eyes and a widow’s peak and a name that sounded fake but wasn’t. Her mouth lifted easily into a Duchenne smile but was often positioned slightly ajar, as if she had misplaced her self-consciousness while trying to process some incomprehensible new development of modern life.
The Parker Posey character does what you’re not supposed to want to do: She conducts clumsy affairs, throws tantrums, kills. Regardless of the plot’s demands, she seems always to be working out her own mess of internal contradictions. She exposes the thrills, heartbreaks and delusions of a lifelong evasion of the conventional. When other women settle down, she moves on. When they commit, she strays. When she’s coupled up, she still feels somehow uncontainable. So many mainstream film characters, especially ones assigned to women, act like windup dolls that sputter into disuse when their scenes end. But Posey’s characters, even the minor ones, seem as if they could beckon the camera into filming a whole other movie — perhaps a movie more interesting than the one they’re in.
Hollywood’s lens has, over the past few decades, narrowed onto a slim set of Gen-X actresses; it can feel as if every mature woman of interest now takes the corporeal form of Nicole Kidman or Cate Blanchett. Even if you’re Parker Posey, there is a certain limitation to being venerated as an icon, especially one pegged as unconventional, offbeat. Her skill at playing strange personalities, and her effusive personal allure, risks trapping her in a pixie jar. And representing the independent woman can be a liability in an industry that has a vacillating and sometimes baldly antagonistic relationship to such figures. It took Posey a long time to come to terms with the fact that show business is a business, one that has too rarely offered her decent roles for decent pay.
Then in 2023, she got a call from Mike White, the independent filmmaker who created “The White Lotus.” He cast Posey a line and reeled her into his superyacht of a television show — one that came with a free first-class ticket to Thailand, an indefinite stay in a string of beachside luxury villas and all the ingredients of a star turn. “The White Lotus” is an upstairs-downstairs satire about rich people on vacation and the workers who serve them, and since its pandemic-era debut in 2021, it has secured six major Emmy Awards, generated fevered discourse about race, sex and money and inspired a compulsive fascination with its leading ladies, heightening the fandoms around Sydney Sweeney, Aubrey Plaza and Jennifer Coolidge. It draws 12 million viewers an episode and has inspired a line of Banana Republic resort wear. And for Posey, the role represents a rare opportunity. At 56, she gets to play a fresh archetype, one that has been all but inaccessible to her: the mother.
Posey’s character is Victoria Ratliff, a Southern financier’s wife who is, in a word, unwell. She has a benzodiazepine dependency, a soporific drawl and a trembling grip on her three children. She is deeply uninterested in the country in which she is vacationing and seems, at times, not quite sure where she even is. As she bears her Thai retreat in a reptilian torpor, roaming from massage pavilion to meditation pond, the show’s perspective teeters between cynicism and empathy, schadenfreude and awe. Victoria is the inverse of the position Posey has long played: “She’s a woman who couldn’t exist without a man,” she says. And yet Posey animates her with such an off-kilter narcissism that she threatens to topple the whole family dynamic. Plenty of comediennes evince a self-deprecating humor. “She’s the opposite,” White told me. “She’s very nonapologetic. Kind of alpha. Just like in life: She owns herself.”
Post-sound bath, Posey and I made our way to Cafe Mogador, where she ordered a plate of Moroccan eggs, a bowl of cauliflower soup and hot water for a bag of tea she’d brought herself. “Mike White is so great at writing women who are alone,” she said, reflecting on her new role. I asked her if she identified as a woman who is alone, and she extended a hand toward me with mild concern. “Of course,” she said. “Don’t you?”
Time magazine once said that Parker Posey “radiates the easy breeding of old-Hollywood royalty,” but in fact her father was an Army man turned car salesman, and her mother worked as a culinary instructor for a kitchen-appliance company. Posey and her twin brother, Chris, were born in Baltimore, two months premature, Posey just the size of a beer can. The family drifted south and settled in Laurel, Miss., a town of 17,000 people and (by Posey’s count) 41 Baptist churches. As a child, Posey would get so lost in her own little world that her father put bells on her notebooks so she wouldn’t forget to write down her homework. She was bursting with kinetic energy, and she found a kind of peace by balancing books on the top of her head and, eventually, dancing en pointe. In high school, she auditioned for a prestigious summer arts program as a dancer, and when she was rejected, an administrator told her father that she had nearly been admitted on the strength of her personality alone. “Tell her she’s an actress,” he said.
At 18, Posey moved to New York to attend the drama program at SUNY Purchase, where she was on perpetual academic probation; she dropped out in her senior year to join “As the World Turns,” playing Tess Shelby, a Southern teenager who fakes a pregnancy. Then she starred in a frantic burst of enduring independent films, a kind of run that had never been seen before and probably will never be again. In Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman,” she was a Dairy Queen employee who dreams of inventing a low-fat Blizzard; in “The House of Yes,” she was a rich girl in a pink suit and pillbox hat who stages incestuous re-enactments of the Kennedy assassination; in “Party Girl,” she was a club kid forced to take a real job in a library, where she has the wildest night of her life learning the Dewey Decimal System. I’ve seen her persona described as exhibiting an “ironic distance,” but her true appeal lies in her uncompromising realism. She is engaged in a close study of life’s surreal surfaces, her cheek pressed up against the glass.
In 1997, that same Time article declared Posey “queen of the indies,” but the superlative represented a mainstream misapprehension of her talents. She preferred the term “indie tramp,” evoking the Charlie Chaplin character who bumbled, childlike, through the trappings of polite society. The “queen” term positioned her as above it all, too cool for the mainstream, but she longed for a wider range of opportunities. A costume drama. A movie musical. She awaited the role that would make Hollywood casting directors wake up and say, as she once imagined it in an interview, “Wow, Parker Posey can play more than a contemporary New Yorker with a lot of problems.” Another interviewer remarked that Posey had carved a niche for herself, and she replied, “The niche has carved me.” After her anointment in Time, she would not carry another movie for five years.
The next decades of her life unfold like a slow-motion disaster flick, in which she must escape a dissolving indie film industry and take refuge in the bit and supporting roles of Hollywood studio pictures — only for those parts, too, to mysteriously disappear. She would be the wacky neighbor, or one of her doubles: the manic girlfriend, the sicko boss, the dog lady. She might be inserted briefly into the life of the leading man, taking him on a spin before depositing him back on the right path. Or she could be plopped next to the female lead, her eccentric habits accentuating the star’s more compliant and sensible allure. In “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), she was the girlfriend so irritating she drove Tom Hanks into Meg Ryan’s inbox. In “The Sweetest Thing” (2002), she was the fiancée so flighty she elbowed Thomas Jane into Cameron Diaz’s arms. In 2004, the feminist film scholars Susanne Kord and Elisabeth Krimmer put it this way: “If actresses such as Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan thrive in roles that invite identification, Parker Posey excels at portraying everything you do not want to be or ever become.” She portrays it so winningly, though, that she makes you think you might want it after all.
Posey once assumed that she could string together such supporting roles all her life, playing friend and neighbor to the stars while driving intriguing indie plots in between. But while Hollywood was initially eager to co-opt the vibes and characters of the dying indies — she called these movies studio indies, or “stindies” — she soon found that even those detours were closing. She would read for a supporting role that could be described as a “Parker Posey type,” only to find it vaporized from the final draft. On the rare occasion that a movie was in fact built around a Posey type, the studio wouldn’t cast the actual Posey: Think of “Along Came Polly,” the 2004 rom-com in which an uptight Ben Stiller gets his necktie loosened by a quirky New York City sprite named, seriously, Polly Prince. (Jennifer Aniston got the part.)
In the early years of her career, Posey had an ambivalence about mainstream recognition that she struggled openly to resolve. Some opportunities she sabotaged herself. In her inspired 2018 memoir, “You’re on an Airplane” — which takes the form of a conversation between Parker Posey and an imagined seatmate on a flight — she writes that she once evaded a meeting about a Matt Damon action film because, as she puts it, “I simply wasn’t prepared to be scared in a car for a few months.” She passed on Angelina Jolie’s role in “Girl, Interrupted” because she was skeptical of a story about “a bunch of depressed white girls in the ’60s.” (Jolie won an Academy Award.) She met Robert DeNiro in a hotel room to tape an audition for “Meet the Parents,” but she couldn’t say her big line without laughing: “I’m not your Pam-cakes anymore, Dad.” (In December, it was reported that Teri Polo was in talks to reprise Pam in the fourth film in the series.) There she was, finally getting her chance to act opposite DeNiro, and she had to play a character who spoke like a pull-string baby doll. “I ached,” she told me. She wanted more, and she could not hide it in the room. Her apartment was, at the time, rent-controlled.
“When you say no to these people, they get — I didn’t know this — but you really can’t say no to a gig,” she said. “If you say no, then maybe it gets out,” and you’re put on the Hollywood “said no” list, and then you’re passed over forever. Or at least, you’re left wondering if that’s what has happened. “I don’t know,” she said. “Am I making it up?” And so, in the early 2000s, with the encouragement of her agents, she played the role of the woman who says yes. She appeared in the third installment of a Marvel franchise (“Blade: Trinity”), the third installment of a slasher movie (“Scream 3”) and the first installment of a comic-book superhero flick too dismal to justify a sequel (“Superman Returns”). When Posey is dropped into the mainstream, her most intriguing qualities are often cast as lightly villainous: girlboss vampire, dog-lady henchman. It was by playing the antagonist in the glossy 2001 teen-pop spoof “Josie and the Pussycats” that Posey secured the mortgage to buy her first apartment.
A tender sincerity peeks out from these performances. Posey is great in a dumb Hollywood role, which gives her an opportunity to flex her grounding in the absurd. In “Scream 3,” she plays a self-absorbed actress as if she’s a “Scooby Doo” character having an existential crisis. She prepped for “Blade” by sporting fangs around the East Village, then showed up on set to act opposite Wesley Snipes’s body double. During a gunfight scene, the director informed her that she was making little “pshew pshew” noises with her mouth. (She apologized and explained, “That’s the sound that you make when you shoot someone.”) “Josie and the Pussycats” bombed, but her sly performance as a craven record executive contributed to its reclamation as a cult classic — as if the Hollywood machine had captured Posey, only to rerelease her into the creative wilds from which she emerged. Most of these big movies underperformed expectations — another thing that Posey knew that Hollywood producers noticed.
In 2008, Posey was cast as the lead in a sitcom, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s follow-up to the megahit “Gilmore Girls,” playing a woman who was trying to become a mother; it was canceled after three episodes. By the mid-aughts, she found that her plan of making a life as a film character actor had to be readjusted to the scale of a television guest appearance. She wandered from set to set, “Bored to Death” to “Parks and Recreation” to “Louie” to “New Girl.” She so immersed herself in these performances that she sometimes found she had trouble moving on. When her “Louie” character, Liz — a kind of manic pixie dream girl who was actually manic — died at the end of her 2012 run, she took it personally. In between takes on Liz’s hospital deathbed, she took bathroom breaks and cried on the floor.
For a performer like Posey, a lack of good material represents a kind of existential threat. Nora Ephron, Posey’s “movie mother,” used to tell her that there wasn’t a conventional bone in her body, and at a certain point, the conventions of her industry became almost intolerable. In 2014, she had what she called a “nervous breakdown” and ended up in the E.R. (“E.R.” being another big Hollywood project that passed her over in her 20s.) In the decade since, she has become more Zen about the whole thing. “Yeah, acting’s weird,” she told me. I asked her if she thought her “White Lotus” role might crack open better film opportunities for her, and she said, “Oh my God, yes! No. I don’t.”
“It’s about the algorithm, darling,” she added with a decadent shrug. I asked her what that meant, and she said: “It’s just a good quote.”
In October 2023, Posey was down South, visiting her mother, when she was invited to attend Jennifer Coolidge’s annual Halloween party at her New Orleans mansion. It was Grimm’s-fairy-tales themed, and the theme was not optional; Posey went as Cinderella, wearing her old hair extensions from the forgotten 2009 Amy Poehler comedy “Spring Breakdown.” Mike White was there, dressed as Hansel, though they barely spoke. Just as he was leaving, he told her that he had been enjoying her recent work. “He greeted me with one foot in the door, and one foot out,” she said — as if considering whether to leave her a breadcrumb trail back to HBO. Then “he just kind of left.”
Posey had admired White’s work for a quarter-century, since she watched “Chuck & Buck,” the psychosexual indie he wrote and starred in, at Sundance in 2000. White recalls first meeting Posey on a New York night out many years ago, where he told her that he was a fan, too. “She was like: ‘Yeah, what is that going to do for me? Give me a job,’” White told me. When he encountered her again at Coolidge’s party, he had been working on the “White Lotus” Season 3 script, and “I was thinking about her,” he told me in a phone call from Bangkok, where he had returned for a blowout third-season premiere. At the Halloween party, “I was trying to suss her out a bit,” he admitted, though he was also, by the end, very intoxicated. He began to dial the Victoria character in Posey’s direction. She originated as “this perfect Southern matriarch,” White said, but now she acquired a bizarre edge. He called with the offer in December.
“Mike White is a wild horse,” Posey says. “I read all the script in one sitting, and I was so adrenalized.” She arrived in Koh Samui in February 2024, after an 18-hour flight, and did not leave for six months. White burst from a coconut grove in a straw sun hat to greet her, sweating through his shirt, with a manic hello she mimicked for me later: “Huh-hi! Huh-hi!” While other cast members flew back and forth, reeling from jet lag, Posey simply relocated to Thailand, where she took an interest in other working women in midlife: a restaurateur with a hand-painted car, a Russian sound-bath practitioner named Svetlana and a government official who conjured photos of Posey’s various performances on her computer, applauded in her direction and said: “I, too, am in my 50s. I’ve been doing this for a long time.”
“The White Lotus” is a nesting doll of wealth and privilege, a show that skewers American tourism while also encouraging its rise. (The fact that the Four Seasons now offers “White Lotus” tie-ins feels a little like advertising a wine tasting at the Hotel California.) As Posey worked at playing a hotel guest, she became one herself; like her character, she was assigned a portion of a villa and what the hotel called a residential assistant. “Michelle Moynahan and I shared a butler,” she clarifies. Unlike her character, she was there to work. She would play Victoria through challenges internal (her thyroid, her hormones, her gut) and imposed (the mosquitoes, the heat, the little boat she had to take to the bigger boat that she took to the yacht where they shot some scenes). “I kept telling Mike White, ‘I’m a woman of a certain age.’”
As Victoria, Posey finally had her chance to play the prototypical rom-com heroine for a wide audience — the girl who marries into wealth, has babies and settles into a white-columned home fit for a founding father. It’s just that we meet Victoria several decades after those movies typically end, when her romantic arc has flatlined, her children are leaving home and she persists in the fantasy of her family she has constructed in her own mind. In playing the trapped Victoria, Posey has been freed of her own trap, the one in which she must act the free spirit forever.
As Posey read the “White Lotus” script, she told me: “I thought about all the things I love about the South. The drama.” Posey played a big Southern personality in HBO’s 2022 true-crime series “The Staircase,” but her role — as the lonely, boozing prosecutor Freda Black — was a variation of her standard type. Now she had been handed an opportunity to draw out the characters of the Southern women she had watched from afar all her life. She felt like an outsider as a teenager in Laurel, the hometown of Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois, but she observed her town’s beauty queens and quarterbacks with such close attention, “it strengthened my compassion,” she once said. Though she ironed out her accent when she moved to New York, now she reveled in broad Southern cadences, “dramatic and funny at the same time.” Before the shoot, Posey had just a 30-minute Zoom call with White to hash out Victoria’s character. He told her that he thought of Victoria as a younger version of Big Edie from “Grey Gardens,” the mother who smothers her adult daughter in the home as their symbiotic life slips into decline. She told him she had some ideas for Victoria’s wardrobe. “She wanted my credit card,” White told me.
“The thing about being an older woman — am I an ‘older woman’? — is that the mother is so powerful,” Posey says. “When you start to look like the mother, even that’s intimidating.” But as Posey began to consider herself as a mother, she experienced a vanishing sensation: “I felt omnipresent, but invisible within the family dynamic,” she says. Victoria has all but abdicated the mother role for that of the coddled child, taking her medicine, drinking her juice, giggling at her son’s repulsive jokes. Victoria’s power is sublimated, but her superiority complex is strong. She has ensured that her brood’s attentions are focused so inward, the energy becomes incestuous.
“The White Lotus” offers us a mirror, but one that twists our features into such deranged spectacle that we become blessedly unrecognizable to ourselves. This season, the show’s surreal dreamscape of ugly Americans has been supersized: There are additional episodes, more full-frontal male nudity, a bigger boat. Its continued appeal rests on the strength of its ensemble, and casting Posey against type was a brilliant stroke. Dropped inside yet another iteration of White’s tourist trap, Posey is one of the few actors capable of creating an outsize personality who nevertheless precisely resembles a real woman you’d find snoring in a $15,000-a-night villa on a tropical resort. She is the keeper of a domestic fantasy, the drama queen of a crumbling family theater. In an America where the masks of the rich and powerful have long been dropped, Posey pulls off a mysterious emotional striptease, revealing the many layers of Victoria — lazy, childlike, despicable, poignant, inimitable.
Watching the first two seasons of the show, waiting her turn, Posey was taken with Mike White’s women, who “look one way in the beginning and another way in the end,” she says. Now Victoria has arrived to fill a Coolidge-shaped hole, the woman in midlife who is so adrift that she transforms into a daffy aspirational figure. Victoria is positioned to become an icon before her curious plot even unspools. The GIFs just about make themselves. In one of her first lines, as she arrives at the resort and surrenders her device to a butler in compliance with the resort’s digital-detox program, she drawls: “I’m sick of these phoooones.” After the New Republic television critic Phillip Maciak saw the episode, he clipped it into a sound bite and made it his new ringtone.
In the 1990s, as her career was on the rise, a 20-something Posey told an interviewer that she was working on a screenplay. She was interested, she said, in writing roles for older women. “I love that I said that,” Posey said when I brought it up. “I’ve always known, or felt, that I would feel most comfortable at this age.”
The entertainment industry has changed since the ’90s, and so has Posey. Her “White Lotus” gig signals the possibility that Hollywood may, once again, be open to making use of her talents. Over the past 25 years, it has been small independent films that have allowed her to prove her elastic range — she does uncommon sadness in Zoe Cassavetes’s “Broken English,” hallucinatory seduction in Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid,” simmering intimacy in “Columbus,” by the Korean American filmmaker Kogonada. “You walk the streets with her, and it feels like you’re in a film,” Kogonada says. “She’s a performance artist who does movies in between.”
Much like a Parker Posey character, she has remained a free-floating entity. Her romantic history has an itinerant quality; she has compared dating to exploring her karmic past lives. She peppered our conversation with anecdotes about her sparkling collection of friends and chosen family: her “chosen parents upstate,” her Y.A. novelist friend, her clothing-designer friend, her art-forger friend. She can make a new life anywhere, but as she has aged she has felt the urge to, as she put it, “regenerate.” A few years ago, she gave up her apartment in the city and settled in the Catskills farmhouse she bought from Tatum O’Neal in 2007, after filming a Pepsi commercial with Jimmy Fallon. There she forged an adoring relationship with Rory, a Highland bull who recently died. “He lives in my heart,” she told me.
Posey is still eyeing escape routes from the movies. Over the years, she has mused about shooting a survival program about off-grid home-building, rebooting an old children’s show about wild animals, starting a slow-TV channel, writing a walk-and-talk film for herself and Camille Paglia and building an intentional community around the farmhouse. “Have you heard of ‘agritainment’?” she asked me after our sound bath, referring to the convergence of agriculture and entertainment that is typically used to describe corn mazes and hayrides but that she imagines as, perhaps, an immersive new art form built into the natural world. Inevitably, though, Hollywood keeps calling her back.
The second time I met Posey, she had arranged for us to undergo another treatment — a sauna in the backyard of a Brooklyn vegan restaurant, followed by a cold plunge — but instead she texted me with a change of plans. A rehearsal had run long, she said, and she wondered if I could pick her up when she got off work. When I arrived at the Public Theater, I learned that she had been cast in Martin McDonagh’s next film, “Wild Horse Nine,” opposite Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich. She emerged from a costume-fitting wearing her rose glasses and a crimson herringbone three-piece outfit made for her in Thailand, with a multitude of hip pockets and a structured necktie. I remembered Posey’s mentioning this film, a ’70s period piece set on Easter Island, at our first meeting, but she described the casting process as so tortured that I assumed the role had eluded her once again.
“He said I had the part, but then he wanted me to ‘read,’” Posey said. “And I was like: I can’t. I can’t!” She had played a Hollywood game many times before, one in which an offer was extended only to be revealed as conditional, then nonexistent. Reading unfamiliar lines under bright lights, pretending to be a character she hasn’t yet created, makes her feel self-conscious and exposed. “It’s just the beginning of the whole process,” she said. “And it feels embarrassing.” When McDonagh dropped in to see her, she still hadn’t opened the FedEx package containing the pages she was meant to perform. “I was like, I can’t even — I don’t even have a relationship to the paper,” she said, miming the role slipping through her fingers. Then she sat with McDonagh and found that, this time, her story had a new ending. He didn’t make her read. The part was hers. Regardless of the various creative and monetary opportunities presented by the agritainment sector, what Parker Posey really wants to do is act.
Stylist: Rushka Bergman. Hair: Mark Townsend. Makeup: Jo Strettell.
Amanda Hess is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times, covering the intersection of internet and pop culture. More about Amanda Hess
The post The Singular Charm of Parker Posey appeared first on New York Times.
