Molly Parker Issue #36

The actress who’s played a druggie, corpse lover, and stripper adds another character to her list: swinging-’70s housewife

By Leah DeVun
Published: June 1st, 2008 | 4:50pm

While other actresses lament the lack of complex roles for young women, Molly Parker seems to be doing just fine. Over the course of her career, the 35-year-old Canadian has played a lap dancer, a laudanum addict, a suffragette, a rabbi, a single mother, and a necrophiliac. After appearing in some 40 films, the versatile actress makes her network television debut in late May in Swingtown, CBS’s controversial new drama.

Set in 1976, Swingtown tells the story of a young married couple, Susan and Bruce Miller, who move to an affluent Chicago suburb in search of a change. Parker plays Susan, a wistful housewife who raised two children, now teenagers, instead of partaking in the counterculture of the ’60s. “Don’t you ever get the feeling there’s something else out there?” she asks Janet, her conservative former neighbor, in the pilot. The Millers find an immediate entrée into the swinging 1970s when their stylish new neighbors, Tom and Trina Decker, invite them to a wild party — and then into their bedroom. Janet is appalled by the drug- and sex-fueled lifestyle of the Deckers, and the Millers have to choose between the comforts of their old friends and the freedoms represented by their new world.

“What’s interesting about Swingtown,” Parker says, is that it captures a unique period during which “regular straight people who weren’t political, who weren’t part of the counterculture, allowed themselves to explore non-monogamy” and sexual liberation. Are network television audiences ready for oversexed suburbanites and coke-sniffing housewives? “I really don’t know how people are going to react,” Parker says. “Certainly there are going to be people who absolutely hate it, but they’re probably the same people who won’t even watch.”

Sexual content is nothing new to Parker, whose breakout role was in the 1996 movie Kissed, in which she played a woman with an erotic attraction to dead bodies. “It’s hard to imagine how sweet and funny [the film] is because it’s about a necrophile, but I was attracted to it because here is this girl, and because of her perversion, she has only herself to please.”

Although she’s appeared in comedies and romances, Parker is probably best known for intense, sexually charged fare such as Kissed, The Center of the World, and Suspicious River. “The women in those films are sort of pushing boundaries in terms of their own power,” Parker says. But she has misgivings about the way in which people have focused on the sexual dimension of her work over its other aspects. Swingtown definitely “doesn’t shy away from sex,” she says, “but it’s really not about that. It’s about a woman’s journey into independence.”

For Parker, Swingtown follows a challenging three-season stint as the widowed addict Alma Garrett on the HBO western Deadwood. “[Alma] was so angry and frustrated by the life that she was allowed to live that she became self-destructive,” Parker says. “It was sort of a depressing job. The writing was fantastic, and from a dramatic standpoint it was fun to do. But it was such a difficult life and so different from where we are now.”

She’s currently filming an episode of Swingtown in which Susan’s husband forbids her to see the pornographic film, Deep Throat. “Her husband’s OK with swinging, but God forbid his wife sees a porno,” she says, laughing. “It’s funny because [Deep Throat] played in regular theaters, and everybody went to see it — and it’s hardcore! That would never happen now. I feel like we’re living in a very conservative time.”