Years ago, one of the actresses who came up in the 1990s said the biggest difference between Hollywood then and now was that women are finally getting credit for putting projects together and producing their own stuff. I was reminded of that as I read through Parker Posey’s interview on the Smartless podcast. I’m surprised Parker even went on this podcast, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by all of Parker’s moves in the past year. She grabbed that amazing role on The White Lotus and now she’s doing the most with her career resurgence. It’s well-deserved – Parker is an icon. In the Smartless pod, she talked about how she used to be typecast as an “indie queen” and gaslit into believing that she couldn’t do studio films.
Parker Posey is opening up about the challenges she faced when making the jump from indie films to studio movies earlier in her career. The White Lotus star made a recent appearance on the Smartless podcast, hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, where she was asked for her reaction to being labeled the “indie queen” in the ’90s, thanks to her iconic roles in Party Girl, Flirt, Dazed and Confused and The Daytrippers. However, Posey admitted that it actually hindered her from getting roles in major studio projects.
“I felt like I was called a name, in a way,” she explained. “My path was more like, ‘Oh, [The Daytrippers director] Greg Mottola did a reading of his movie that he was trying to get financed,’ and then I introduced him to Liev Schreiber who was in Party Girl, and then we do The Daytrippers a year later. It was such a community back then. I felt like right when I got exposed, and the whole indie movement got exposed, it also got co-opted by the studio system, and then it became this other thing. All of a sudden, I wasn’t viable to get a movie financed, and it was such a head trip because I would have to audition for Hollywood movies when I’d carried the lead in independent movies that were shot in 23 days.”
Looking back, Posey believes she was “gaslit” into thinking she wasn’t on the same playing field as other notable Hollywood names. Posey has previously spoken about losing out on big roles to Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock, such as 1994’s Speed, which ultimately saw Bullock land the role of Annie, because she was “too indie.”
“[I would say], ‘I can promise I can memorize these lines in the script, and we’ll have a blast, trust me!’” She added. “So I had, like, a good 20 years of that after, and then working with great auteurs and doing these [films], not getting paid a lot, but being able to work and fulfill my creativity.”
This sounds similar to Chloe Sevigny’s experience, right? Chloe leaned into the indie thing, but she also openly pursued television work to pay the bills because studios were not interested in her whatsoever. With Parker, it feels like it was worse than typecasting though – they really just didn’t want to hire someone with her “indie queen” profile, they didn’t think she was “viable,” even though she was clearly putting together projects and enough of a name to get indie films financed. And it’s also crazy because she was legitimately proving to everyone that she was a leading lady and a fantastic actress. When I watched her in The White Lotus, I felt sort of sad that she hasn’t been giving those kinds of fantastic performances every year because people didn’t have enough imagination to hire her.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
