Parker Posey

words by > D. Heimpel

Parkey Posey has become an indie darling based not only on talent and instinct, but also- and most importantly - on being herself

As she wanders about her Manhattan apartment in a bathrobe, shushing her miniature poodle, 38-year-old actress Parker Posey is far from her Southern home of Laurel, Mississippi. Her filmography, which has spanned independent movies and big studio productions, speaks of an accomplished actress, and in talking with Posey and the people around her, a magnetic persona emerges.

“In a world that tries to pigeonhole everyone, the only way to pigeonhole her is to say she is Parker Posey,” says Ryan Shiraki, director and co-writer of her latest big studio production, Warner Brothers’ Spring Breakdown. “She’s not a one-trick pony.”

While there may be no way to define Posey, she likens herself to Truman Capote’s most perfect character, Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly. “She is someone from the South who came to New York and made a new life,” Posey says.

And—like Golightly—that new life has been bent on following her instincts. Posey has managed to build a public image on doing what she wants when she wants, even if it means traveling along a path that isn’t exactly linear.

Posey has acted in 49 films and a long string of TV shows since a 1991 appearance on the soap “As the World Turns.” While a supporting role in last year’s Superman Returns and starring role in upcoming Spring Breakdown may look like swings to the mainstream, hometown friends see it as perfectly allied with her individuality. Posey herself sees it more as an opportunity to try something different, like changing the curtains in her apartment or rearranging the furniture in her living room. If it feels right, she does it.

This spring and summer will be busy for Posey, who has two independent films arriving in theaters: Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim and Zoe Cassavetes’ Broken English.

Fay Grim, which is being released next month, is the thriller follow-up to 1997’s Henry Fool. The film takes Posey’s character across the globe searching for her father, who is wanted by the CIA.

In Broken English, a Sundance favorite hitting theaters this summer, Posey plays Nora Wilder, a thirtysomething Manhattanite with a string of somber relationships. Berated by her overbearing mother (played by Gena Rowlands) and envious of her friend (Drea de Matteo), who has a perfect relationship—or so it seems— Wilder is understandably cynical. But then she meets a Frenchman with a penchant for adventure, and everything changes.

Immediately after completing rigorous shooting schedules for the two independent projects, Posey jumped right into Spring Breakdown, which follows three women (Posey, Rachel Dratch and Amy Poehler) who find themselves on an irreverent spring break vacation.

“I get this call,” Posey says. “Do you wanna do a movie with Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch from ‘Saturday Night Live?’” Of course, the answer was yes. “Women are very different in their sense of comedy than men are. It’s more… I guess girly,” she continues. “Guys who do comedy are mostly just grown-ups acting like children.”

Shiraki calls the film “Old School with women,” and similar comedy ensues. Posey’s character, Becky, is sent to South Padre Island to chaperone her boss’ daughter. Becky ends up entering a wet T-shirt contest, diving into a vat of salsa and mourning her dead cat, among other wild things.

For Posey, who has performed opposite such varied actors as Kevin Spacey in Superman Returns and William Shatner in “Boston Legal,” a role is a role. If she feels she can get into the skin of the character, then she’ll do it.

“I’ve always had pretty good instincts about things, but it’s more about linking up what’s going on inside to a particular project,” Posey says. “I’ll be questioning something about myself, and a part will present itself, and then I’ll go, ‘Oh I can do this now, this makes sense, I know the truth of this part.’ This happens with the independent projects more, because the parts are much more dynamic.”

But before the indies and the big studio movies, Posey had to simply survive. Born premature, Posey’s mother always told her, “You were born fighting.”

“I was fed through an eyedropper,” she says. “[I was] a little preemie, with fingers the size of a pinky fingernail. I had a lot of trauma when I was born and a lot of my energy comes from that.”

A high school friend, Rand McLaughlin remembers Posey having a special umphhh that propelled her forward. “I’m not surprised in the least at where she is today, and what she has done,” he says. “A lot of people in Laurel feel the same way. When all our friends return for the holidays and get to talking, nobody says, ‘Wow.’ We would have been surprised if she had failed.”

Anita Boyd, Posey’s high school theater teacher, remembers Posey’s first production: Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. Of course, Posey was the star. At that age, she was already showing the versatility that would later make her a success. “Missy was such a team player,” Boyd says, using Posey’s childhood nickname. “In acting, sometimes you get a role, and maybe it’s not the lead, but it’s the role that suits you best. She always understood what role fit her best.” And it’s to that willingness to change that Boyd attributes Posey’s success.

While Posey wasn’t the “wild youngun stealing turkey eggs” that Holly Golightly was before she re-invented herself in New York, Posey’s move from Laurel to study acting at SUNY Purchase, near New York City, nonetheless had a profound impact on her.

“I find the city mystical, I really do, and I spend a lot of time walking around just following my nose,” Posey says. “I like the inner dialogue when you

I AM ALWAYS CHANGING, WHICH COULD BE WHY I LIKE CITIES SO MUCH.

I feel like I’m transforming all the time.

walk around a city and sometimes it links up in really beautiful ways to your outside world… like taking a nature hike, but, instead of trees, there are people and buildings. But, I am always changing, which could be why I like cities so much. I feel like I’m transforming all the time.”

Since the move, Posey has performed on Broadway, appeared on TV and even gyrated across from Jimmy Fallon in a Pepsi commercial. Despite having done so much, Posey has maintained an almost cult-like adoration among her colleagues and fans. She has a special magnetism, one that comes from something very rare in the celebrity-crazed world of big movies and egos. It’s a magnetism derived from being herself.

“It’s not the same kind of effect you have from different actresses, [who have] no variation and whose public persona occupies the screen,” Shiraki says. “Parker’s occupies the screen to some degree, but her range makes her extraordinary.”

For Posey, staying true to herself is nothing out of the ordinary. “I run into people asking, ‘How do you do it?’” she says earnestly. In a moment when she could sound self-laudatory, she’s plain, even ponderous. “I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. I just knew. It was the life of an actor that I wanted,” she says.

Even though it’s the life she wanted, Posey is not impervious to what Holly Golightly described as the “mean reds” —a case of hyper-anxiety and existential angst. “I get the ‘blue meanies’ more than the ‘mean reds’… although since I quit smoking I’ve seen more of my ‘mean reds,’” she says.

When asked what she will be doing next as far as her acting goes, Posey slyly answers, “I’m going to move my armchair to the other side of the apartment, or maybe not.” Also on her list is finishing those curtains. “I busted out my sewing machine… although I haven’t decided on a color yet,” she says.

While Posey’s decisions may seem whimsical, they are anything but. “You got to want it to be good,” Holly Golightly says in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Posey couldn’t agree more. Playing characters as varied as an über-librarian with haute fashion sense in 1995’s Party Girl to a bossy senior in Dazed and Confused to a ditzy back-up singer in a folk band for the Christopher Guest mockumentary, A Mighty Wind—not to mention quirky roles in almost every other Guest spoof—Posey has only done what she wants.

So when she vacillates on the position of the table in the living room or the color of her curtains, it’s only natural. Her interior design regimen seems just as rigid as her upcoming acting schedule: ever changing.