SUBURBIA:
INTERVIEW WITH PARKER POSEY
By Prairie
Miller
If your
taste in movies runs along edgy and offbeat lines, you're sure to run
into Parker Posey at the plexes because she's in just about every one
of those kinds of flicks coming out lately. The 27 year old actress
graduated from a spell as conniving teen Tess on the tv soap As The
World Turns, to go on to play temperamental women with personality in
everything from Dazed And Confused, Party Girl, Amateur, Flirt,Kicking
And Screaming and Sleep With Me to Waiting For Guffman, The Daytrippers
and Drunks. In Richard Linklater's coming of age strip mall noir subUrbia,
Posey's an existential rock publicist who worries that there might be
more to life than "yogurt, the stairmaster and shaving the bikini
line." The actress gave her version as to what's right and wrong
with the movie world today.
Prairie
Miller: You've had some wild overnight successes as an actress and could
probably pick and chose your roles. Why do you stick with the independents?
Parker
Posey: Independent filmmakers write women better and they write women
stronger. Independents like Richard Linklater tend to be more open to
women who have a sense of humor and colorful personalities. They appreciate
them, as opposed to big budget movies that make women either soft and
pretty or sexy and malicious.Independent filmmakers get it more about
women. They're not intimidated.
My whole
thing is those older men who are just so terrified, it's sad, that women
started to work. But the filmmakers who are younger, do you know what
I mean, they saw their mothers working, so they're used to women working
and women being strong. So they write stronger women, that's been my
experience.
PM: Would
you take a role in a Hollywood movie?
PP: Sure,
yeah, where do I sign? I'll play those wife roles, sure, get a million
dollars to scramble some eggs. I'd want to make it more than that, of
course. But when you have a male star. they don't encourage much from
the female star.
PM: Are
you anything like the characters you play?
PP: Am
I wild and outspoken? I don't think so, but people tell me I am. I guess
there is a part of me that is very much like the people I play, or I
wouldn't be cast as them, right?
PM: Whatever
possessed you to want to become an actress?
PP: I was
always daydreaming and stuff like that when I was a child. I'd watch
Sonny & Cher, and I was always Sonny. But I was more shy than I
seem to be. Like people go, you must have been bouncing off the walls,
but I was really a nice kid. Like I was the one who would hold the girl's
hand who had the skin rash. I grew up in a small southern town, so I
had a lot of time to daydream and watch all the insane southern people
around me. It doesn't get any more bizarre than the south. But the south
is very much a part of me.
PM: How
have you managed to find those multi-dimensional characters to play
and bypass the bimbo parts that are mostly around you?
PP: I throw
the scripts across the room, I just throw them across the room. They
offend me, I can't believe the crap that is out there. And I can't believe
people stand for it. I don't know, it seems to be the popular thing
for actresses to take their shirts off and to appear on every cover
of every magazine looking like a porn star. That seems to be all the
rage of the past five or ten years that I'm very offended by. Let Madonna
do it, she has a good spin on it.
I mean,
everyone's trying to look sexy in a way that is a cliche, from sixteen
year old stars to actresses in their forties and fifties. It's just
been done too much. How many times are we going to see some actress
with a sheet on the cover of Rolling Stone? Women should just go no,
I won't do that. It's what I say, no, I'm not gonna do that.
Copyright
1997 by Prairie Miller
NOTE: This
article came from www.bigstar.com
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