At first, Molly Parker said no.
When Vancouver director Lynne Stopkewich sent her a script and asked Parker to play the lead role in her second film -- about a motel receptionist who sells herself to guests, falls for a drifter and ends up horrifically abused by him -- Parker said no.
She had already put herself on the line for Stopkewich once before, in the 1996 indie hit Kissed, the first feature film for both of them. Parker played a necrophile working for an undertaker, a role that won her critical acclaim and the attention of a dozen more directors. But making the film was creepy and hard, and here was Stopkewich calling again about a role sure to be even harder.
"I knew she had this book she was really excited about," Parker recalls. "And then she sent me the script and I was just horrified by the material -- only in the idea of having to actually do it myself, not in terms of what it is, because I think it's really valid -- but I said to her, why, why do you want to do this, this is going to be hell.
"I realized that I was frightened to do it, not because I thought it would be a bad thing to do or a bad movie to make, but because I personally didn't want to go where this girl has to go." Parker half grins, half groans, at the memory of that conversation: "I said, Lynne, my life is finally really good and I'm happy.God, to go to that place, the idea just kills me."
But Parker did it, in the end, and Suspicious River is now garnering the same sort of attention on the festival circuit as did Kissed. Parker saw the film for the first time in Venice last week and watched in awed satisfaction as "grown Italian men left the theatre weeping." The Toronto festival brought her here a day later, with a bit of Hollywood glamour (sleek auburn hair and knee-high patent-leather boots) mixed with her still very Canadian slang and elocution. (The knees peeking out above the boots are lightly freckled, the way you'd expect on someone called Molly.)
A Vancouver native, Parker was based in Toronto for the busy years after Kissed. Eight months ago, she moved to L.A. with her partner, Montreal filmmaker Matt Bissonnette, operating on the theory that this would allow them to be together more. But she's been on the road perpetually, and he's been in Toronto finishing up his first feature-length film. However, she recently found them a house to rent in the not-trendy-at-all neighbourhood of Echo Park and she's clearly quietly thrilled at the idea of having a chance to nest a little.
Not that life in L.A. is entirely sunny: Parker is scathing about the consumer and appearance obsessions of the city. "For women, it's particularly difficult, because there is so much value placed on what you look like," she says. "As an actor, you work in a medium that's about visual aesthetics anyway, so you know that, but there, it is just the most important thing.
I've been in positions where it's, 'She's the best, she did the best audition, but she's just not quite pretty enough.' " The only thing that keeps her sane, she says, is the knowledge that there are other actors, directors and designers, who find the whole thing as bizarre as she does, but who have gone there because they can get their work made.
Parker's angular, mesmerizing face wound up on the cover of Variety after Kissed, and she has been working like a demon ever since. Her film credits from the past couple years include Istvan Szabo's Sunshine (in which she played opposite Ralph Fiennes); Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland; Waking the Dead, produced by Jodie Foster; the new Wayne Wang movie Center of the World; Bruce Sweeney's new film Last Wedding; a movie called The War Bride, which she shot recently in Edmonton, plus the quirky CBC television series Twitch City.
For once, though, there is no new project immediately around the corner -- "the last little while has been really full," she says.
Suspicious River was physically gruelling -- plagued by the financial woes Parker has seen in all Canadian film projects and filmed, much of it outside, in a steady December downpour in Vancouver. However, the film wasn't emotionally taxing in the way she feared it would be.
"I almost didn't feel anything," she recalls. "I kept thinking, I'm not working hard enough or I'm not connecting, I'm doing something wrong. It was almost at the end of the film I realized that that's how this woman is with her life, she's completely disconnected from her body and her spirit and any sort of life force that she should have."
And while the subject matter in Suspicious River is a little less Out There than that of Kissed, Parker found that made it, in some ways, more difficult to do.
" Kissed was very much a fantasy -- I don't know a necrophile and I don't know anyone who does, so a lot of that was able to be played as an idea and out of our imaginations," she says quietly and forcefully. "But this is different. I do know women who have been prostitutes and I do know women who have been raped and I do know women who have the ability to disassociate from their bodies . . . so it was really difficult because it was much more about something, because there are women and girls, tonnes of them, living that life every day."
And only for Stopkewich would she have done a role that included a half-dozen rape scenes and plenty of being slapped around.
"I've never had a creative relationship in my life like I have with Lynne," Parker says, translucent hands clasped over the freckled knees. "She and I are really good friends, I know she loves me and would never make me look bad, and because of all those things there's a trust there. Also that I trust her aesthetic and her politics -- we have those things in common and I understand why she wanted to make this film even if she couldn't articulate it to me at the beginning."
And was it only Parker that the director could imagine as her beleaguered heroine?
"She just knew I'd do it, man," she says, rolling her blue-grey eyes. "Not just do the part, but I'd go as far as she wanted me to go."