Posey: An unlikely star of serial television
It seemed only right that, at a certain point in an unpredictable conversation with Parker Posey, the topic of true evil in the universe would arise.
Posey was talking about her portrayal of the devious Dr. Smith in a new Netflix reboot of “Lost in Space” — a rare television role on a résumé full of quirky indiefilm protagonists, and the first honest-to-badness villain she has played in some time.
“Can she just not help herself ?” she wondered aloud in her ethereal voice. “Am I going to save the world? Am I going to destroy it?” She concluded that her Dr. Smith was the “dark Medusa force” of the resuscitated “Lost in Space” show.
“She can go under and take everyone with her,” Posey said. “But she also has the strength to save herself and others.”
More than 25 years into an everchanging acting career, Posey, 49, continues to embody the irrepressible energy she has brought to films like “Dazed and Confused,” “Waiting For Guffman” and “Party Girl.”
She unapologetically wears oversized, Elaine Stritch-style eyeglasses and carries Tic Tacs in a dispenser the shape and size of a giant Tic Tac. She shares her West Village apartment with Gracie, her 14-year-old bichon frise-poodle-Maltese mix; her friends are fellow artists — actors, comedians, directors — and her tastes are eclectic. Her idea of a good movie, she said, would be something from “the Estonian film festival I saw 10 years ago.”
Like her best-known characters, Posey carries herself with a blithe spirit that conceals a cutting sense of humor. She spent a walk through her neighborhood on
the lookout for starlings and blue jays, and when asked for the address of a restaurant she recommended, she answered: “I’m not going to tell you. I’m a practicing psychic and I want to see if you can read my mind.”
For Posey, playing Dr. Smith is an opportunity to cavort among the stars on a big-budget series and to put her unique stamp on a beloved cult-TV character.
But it’s also an acknowledgment of how challenging it has become, even for an actor of Posey’s stature, to make a living solely from small prestigious films in today’s industry.
“I was so happy to find a place within the show at this time,” she said. “I was absolutely, wholeheartedly relieved. Because I really had not felt that I had a place. I know it doesn’t look like that from the outside.”
The original “Lost in Space,” which ran on CBS from 1965 to 1968, followed the interplanetary adventures of the Robinson family. On that series, Dr. Smith, as played by Jonathan Harris, was a conniving and campy foil who bickered with the family’s robot and spouted alliterative insults.
Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, the producers who developed the Netflix reboot, which began streaming April 13, said they did not want to copy or caricature what Harris did with the role.
Sazama and Sharpless reconceived the character, changing Dr. Smith’s gender and making her a low-level criminal on Earth, who steals her own sister’s identity — and later a doctor’s title and uniform — so she can reinvent her life in another star system.
Imagining their Dr. Smith as a 21st-century upgrade of the nefarious title character from “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Sharpless said this approach was possible only because of Posey’s blend of comedic and dramatic talents.
Over the years, Posey has occasionally dabbled in television, on shows like “The Good Wife” and “Search Party.” She said she felt left behind by the explosion of serialized genre shows — like “Game of Thrones” and “The Walking Dead” — that she does not believe she would fit into and does not watch. (Even the Netflix sci-fi anthology “Black Mirror,” she said, is off the table: “I hear it’s really good, but I don’t want to watch it alone,” she explained. “I’m scared to.”)
Yet each time she’d speak to a friend or peer who was happily thriving in a genre TV role, she remained hopeful that an appropriate role would come her way.
Recalling a conversation she had had with Denis O’Hare, who was then playing a malevolent vampire on HBO’s “True Blood,” Posey said he told her, “It’s like Shakespeare — you get to be really epic in your emotions.”
Much to her satisfaction, “Lost in Space” has allowed Posey to perform her own Shakespearean pastiches, like a soliloquy addressed to the decapitated head of a robot. And it has let her share scenes with actors like Selma Blair (“Cruel Intentions,” “Legally Blonde”), a guest star who plays Dr. Smith’s wealthy, disapproving sister.
Describing a scene that required her to pass out (under the influence of drugs that Posey’s character had surreptitiously slipped her), Blair said: “I decided I was really going to milk it. And Parker was laughing, like, ‘I feel like you’re on an episode of ‘Columbo.’ You really love acting, don’t you?’ Coming from Parker, it wasn’t an insult.”
Blair said it was a positive development that Posey had finally made the crossover to serialized television.
“She should be a big-deal, household name,” Blair said. If TV hadn’t snapped Posey up already, she said it was because past series “might not be the best fit for people who have a real gravity and an eccentricity.” But now, Blair said, “They’re making such great shows for people like her, and hopefully one day for people like me.”