Not to be too hipster about this, but yes, my favourite Molly Parker role predates Deadwood and is so obscure that it doesn’t appear on her Wikipedia page. At least, not in the biography section. She’s not the lead, and she’s not the not-lead who gets the most attention, but in my opinion she’s giving the most complicated performance in the film. I love watching her in Men With Brooms. There’s so much delight and so much pain and so much ferocious determination. She’s fantastic, and so hipster I may be but seriously go out and watch Men With Brooms.
She does not have the Typical Canadian Acting Career. She’s never done a DeGrassi. She’s never done a Murdoch Mysteries. It’s less surprising that she’s never done Red Green, because she’s a woman, but Men With Brooms was her first appearance with Paul Gross, because she never did Due South. (She has appeared in a lot of things with Callum Keith Rennie, though, including—to my delight—in Hard Core Logo.) While her career is quite distinctly Canadian in a lot of ways, it’s also a lot more American than a lot of other performers.
On the Canadian side, there’s Twitch City, the sitcom she did with fellow Paul Gross costar Don McKellar. There’s Poltergeist: The Legacy. There’s something called Neon Rider, about a man who makes his ranch a home for troubled youth. She’s been in a movie set in Vancouver, not just ones filmed there. She’s been in a war drama mostly set in Canada. If you know your Canadian pop culture, you can pick out certain of her works and know they’re Canadian without looking it up. And not just because you, have, say, actually seen Hard Core Logo.
The American stuff is wild. She did a Disney movie about the Donner Party in the ‘90s. Not to mention Peter Pan & Wendy with Jude Law as Captain Hook. Deadwood, of course; you can’t talk about Molly Parker without talking about how fantastic she is as Alma. (And her portrait is in Boardwalk Empire as Nucky’s late wife!) Nicolas Cage pulls a gun on her in The Wicker Man and steals her bicycle. She was in the Netflix remake of Lost in Space. She was the rabbi on Six Feet Under. She was in the John Cusack Hitler movie Max. It’s frankly amazing.
Molly Parker is one of those actresses whose appearance in a movie delights anyone who knows who she is and rapidly gains converts when people get to know her. I was thrilled when she appeared in Deadwood, and my friends who got to know her from Deadwood were then thrilled when she appeared in other things they saw. And now she’s become one of many selling points for Men With Brooms when I’m talking it up to people. It’s the circle of life, folks.
