Parker Posey

“I have a parasite,” she confesses.

Did you give it a name? Like Bobby?

“I haven’t named it yet. But I think it looks like a gremlin, like a microscopic gremlin. Maybe there are a lot of them. They like certain kinds of foods, like sugar and wheat. It’s really hard. At first, I was really craving it. Wheat is in everything; sugar is in everything. I’m eating cereal. But I gave it up. I was drinking chai lattes from Starbucks. They’re full of sugar. It’s a sugar drug. But, yeah—I had some cool things happen over there. I liked Albuquerque a lot. Great flea markets.”

Don’t forget Route 66.

“Route 66. They had a Route 66 oven mitt. I almost got it; I should have gotten it. I just like that kind of hippie-burnout scene. It really is an enchanted place. I was flying down the freeway just exhilarated at the no-traffic.”

Posey also drove to Taos and visited the Hanuman Temple, and in Santa Fe she befriended an Ayurvedic chef named Prakash. She also bought souvenir socks. “[They] had a snake on them,” she says. “They had an alien, too.”

Do you believe in extraterrestrial life?

“I was reading this book called Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind,” she says. “It’s really, really good if you want to believe in that stuff. There’s a UFO convention, and no one’s ever gotten together to explain what an abduction is. C.D.B. Bryan—he’s like a legit writer—he went there and then he follows these women. He decides to go live with some people out there and see for himself. It was around then that I put the book down because I got scared. I had dreams of conehead aliens when I was little. Before Saturday Night Live did it. And then they came out with them, and I went on to be a glorified extra in the movie. When everyone else was laughing, I was scared. I remember I was in the garage, and they were surrounding me.” Posey takes another sip of Mu 16, and her instant of childhood terror evaporates with a perfectly Parkeresque rejoinder. “Maybe it explains my parasites.”

Her extensive travels to foreign-location shoots for Cassavetes and Hartley might’ve been enough to cause at least some indigestion, but—more importantly—they seem to mark a turning point that began a couple years back with Posey’s appearance in Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity, moving beyond ingenue-type roles. The arc may continue on television now that Posey is starring in the pilot for a new Fox sitcom, The Return of Jezebel James. Conceived by Amy Sherman-Palladino (The Gilmore Girls), the show casts her as a divorced children’s author who asks her younger sister to carry her child. Though she’s previously guested on Will and Grace and Boston Legal, Posey has never cottoned to prime time. Clearly, she’s up for new adventures. After all, it’s ironic that someone so identified with New York would have to hopscotch around the world to find two of her most significant roles.

“The kind of role that would have been good for her 10 years ago—she doesn’t want to do those anymore,” says Hartley. As singular in his filmmaking as Posey is in her acting, the director was an early admirer. He cast Posey for a small part in 1993’s Flirt not long after she graduated from SUNY-Purchase, where her fellow alumni included Stanley Tucci, Nick Gomez, Wesley Snipes, Edie Falco and Sherry Stringfield, formerly of E.R., who was Posey’s roommate. While every struggling actor takes parts in no-budget independent efforts, Hartley notes that Posey had a nose for winners. “She knows when something is right for her. A lot of the films she did unpaid got distributed. I think she did like four out of 10 that way. She’s good at reading scripts.”

Hartley has offered Posey many parts through the years that she’s turned down. “She’s the first to say, ‘There needs to be someone younger than me,’ or ‘somebody more together than I am.’” Fay Grim has been looming for several years. “We used to joke while we were making Henry Fool that it would become an ongoing series,” he says. “It would be our own personal Star Wars.”

Fay Grim is yet another of Hartley’s dialogue-rich projects. Bouncing along to its own uncanny frequency, it requires a keen grasp of rhythm. This, Hartley says, comes naturally to Posey. But the challenge cuts both ways. “It’s been the big ambition of mine to make the Parker Posey movie,” he says. “And it needs to be bigger than life because she’s just that dynamic.”

Posey—whom co-star Jeff Goldblum likens to Martha Graham in her innate feel for on-camera movement—pretty much holds down every scene, carrying a twisty plot that tangles mock-literary intrigue with 9/11 conspiracies and the heightened, absurdist tone at which Hartley excels.

“Oh, I love him,” Posey says. “He’s so special.”

What’s so special about him?

There’s a long pause. Posey leans back for a second or two.

“He’s a musician, you know? He writes music. And he’s also a great writer. He’s highly intelligent. He’s a natural at screenwriting—and he paints. He’s such an artist. He really is. That’s why he’s talked about, and misunderstood, and people have such strong reactions to his work. He’s also studied film. He’s… you know, he’s a real… dork! And he loves women. He loves to see them move. And he’s got a great sense of humor. You show up and you are shown what to do and where to move when, and when to say your lines, and it’s all about creating a certain energy around a character.”