Parker Posey

Parker Posey is twisting herself into a pretzel.

OK, maybe you wouldn’t call it a pretzel. More like Winged Victory ornamenting the hood of a vintage Bentley, zooming through the English countryside with some petulant rock dude in the driver’s seat. No, hold up. That’s almost cheesy. And the peculiar vectors the lithe actress is bending her limbs along, as the late-afternoon light pours through massive windows in an endless loft facing the Hudson River, are not cheesy at all. They are… transformational. Parker Posey is busting out her crazy new yoga moves—just a spur-of-the-moment thing before the photo shoot. Only it feels like an every-moment thing. You can easily imagine that on any given afternoon, anywhere in the world, the petite actress might bolt up from her makeup chair in an excitable swirl and do what she’s doing right now.

She has her left foot against the wall, and she’s pointing her right knee forward, like Wonder oman crouching to leap off a skyscraper. She’s improvising these little motions with her hands, too, which may be part of the technique imparted to her on a recent visit to New Mexico, ancestral home of crash-landed Martians, the hydrogen bomb and, apparently, the kick-ass yogi who taught one of America’s most congenial screen presences how to become human origami. “Oh yeah!” Posey exclaims, gesticulating while somehow holding her arcane pose, which doesn’t look nearly as painful as it does improbable. Gracie, her three-and-a-half-year-old Bichon-Maltese mix, looks on in canine wonderment. “And then we had to go like this…” She purses her lips, pushes tongue to palate, and mimes a mosquito: Zzzzzzzuhtttttt!

No, Posey is no stranger to buzz. She’s generated it her entire professional life, beginning in 1993 with her major film debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. As Darla Marks, the whipped-cream wielding scourge of incoming freshmen girls at an Austin, Texas-area high school, she made an immediate impression amid a cast of future all-stars that included Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams. Not long after the film’s release, Posey was at a Halloween party in New York and saw someone dressed up as the gum-smacking, rainbow-denimed Darla. Voila! She was now a hipster icon. It’s a status the urbane Mississippi native has sustained through 50 subsequent films, an array of big and little pictures in which she’s displayed an unabashed vivacity her peers can’t touch. That many of these films are cult favorites—like Party Girl (1995), The House of Yes (1997) and each of Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries (most notably 1996’s Waiting for Guffman)—gives Posey some added cachet when she turns up in the occasional suburban multiplex spectacle, an FX-laden Blade, Scream or Superman sequel here, a hanky-soiling You’ve Got Mail there. Even the least of these “money jobs” becomes instantly more pleasurable—and somehow knowing—during Posey’s transit across the frame. Audiences love her because she charges up idiosyncratic characters with a charming mix of chin-up pluck and vulnerable humanity.

Such qualities loom large in Posey’s latest ventures, which offer varying perspectives on some common themes. If, for years, the actress has been cast in a consistent light, applauded as the archetype of a certain freewheeling New York sensibility, she’s eager to shake that up. As the namesake of Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim, Posey revisits her role in that cult-film-of-all-cult-films, Henry Fool (1997). Her character is now a single mother and a neophyte spy, who chases clues from Queens to Berlin to Istanbul in pursuit of the vanished Henry and the mystery of his curious notebooks, now believed to be linked to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It’s as unlikely an international action thriller as anyone could imagine (cars blowing up in a Hal Hartley movie?), and perhaps—even in its talky, cerebral way—it gives Posey her “Bond Girl” moment. But it’s also the story of an emotional quest, which requires she be seen as a fully grown woman, not a glammy gamine in a weightless pas de deux with I Love the ’90s! zeitgeist. Likewise, in Broken English, the new thinking-gal’s chick flick directed by Zoe Cassavetes, Posey takes on a role that’s a logical fit for her 38 years. Her Nora is much like the ’90s’ “party girl” after the party’s over: Single and bored with her job as a hospitality wiz at a trendy hotel, she has a passionate encounter with a raffish French guy, and has to decide if she wants to follow him to Paris.

“It’s an every-woman-who-is-our-age kind of story,” says Cassavetes, the 36-year-old daughter of American independent-cinema legends John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands (who plays Nora’s mother in the film). Making her feature debut as a director, with only 20 days to shoot in New York and Paris, Cassavetes had even more than usual riding on her lead performer. Posey was pretty much the only name on her list. “I like her whole inner life,” she continues. “Parker’s one of my favorite actresses ever. I’ve been to every play and every movie. I felt like I knew her. In the fantasy casting world, I thought maybe Parker would do it. Then I had tea with her for three hours and we didn’t even talk about the movie. finally, I asked her, ‘Do you think you’d like to do it?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ Like that!”

We follow Cassavetes’ lead and meet Posey for tea one afternoon near Chelsea, at her favorite macrobiotic restaurant. There, we consume several cups of a brew called Mu 16, which according to our menu contains licorice, ginseng, peony root and a dozen other herbal essences—Mu 16 is not only flavorfully addictive, it induces a faint glowing sensation. There’s a lot of talk, though not much about movies, which somehow seems logical. Posey has just returned from one of her “money jobs”—she plays Jessica Alba’s big sister in a remake of the Hong Kong horror flick The Eye, in which a corneal transplant goes very, very wrong. There will, apparently, be lots of blood and screaming and creepy interludes, though as Posey puts it, “I’m glad I could just do the sister and be kind of clueless.”

But Posey’s trips to the American Southwest had a cosmic effect on the actress, plunging her into some serious Eastern discipline. “New Mexico was cool,” she begins, as we await the kale, brown rice, salmon and various root veggies that will soon blanket the small tabletop. “I hung out. I got into the whole Ayurvedic thing. It was really cool. I quit smoking and stopped drinking coffee. I just want to balance myself holistically and see what different foods do what to me.” She pauses momentarily.