No one will ever accuse Molly Parker of playing it safe.
The Genie Award-winning Canadian actress, who seems to seek out roles based on their sheer challenge quotient, is doing double duty in this year's Local Heroes International Film Festival. She stars in Suspicious River with former Edmontonian Callum Keith Rennie, then appears in tomorrow's shot-in-Edmonton closing gala feature, The War Bride.
Suspicious River, which screens tonight at the Princess Theatre, is the second film Parker has made with director Lynne Stopkewich, after Stopkewich's controversial but critically acclaimed debut Kissed.
In Kissed, Parker plays a romantic necrophile who works in a funeral home. In Suspicious River, her character works in a motel by day and sells her body to the men who pass through by night.
And in her upcoming film Center of the World, directed by Wayne Wang, Parker plays a stripper lured to Las Vegas by a business tycoon. It just received an NC-17 rating in the U.S. due to its sexual content.
Parker, one might assume, knows no fear.
Not entirely true, she says.
"A lot of decisions (in Hollywood) get made based on fear," Parker said on the phone from her home in Los Angeles's historic Echo Park neighbourhood.
"It's something that I try really hard to not buy into ... (but) I'm often attracted to projects that scare me in terms of what they're about, because it challenges who I am and who I think I am and what I think the world is about.
"I'm interested in drama, and I'm interested in why people are as crazy as they are, and why I'm crazy, and those are the things that I get to learn being an actor. So, you know, I'm not really doing it to be on the cover of Vanity Fair."
Still, that might not be out of the question. Parker seems to get noticed in every project she touches of late, from Don McKellar's oddball sitcom Twitch City to films like Jeremy Podeswa's The Five Senses and Istvan Szabo's epic Sunshine, in which she starred alongside Ralph Fiennes.
Like many Canadian actors, the Vancouver-raised Parker recently chose to relocate to Los Angeles to further her career. Unlike some Canadian actors, she's realistic and pragmatic about it. And while she may not drive to auditions humming Randy Newman's I Love L.A. under her breath, she doesn't actively despise the place, either.
"It's an easy place to hate, because it's sort of obviously evil in a certain way," she said. "You can drive around, and it just looks like strip malls for days, you know?
"And then, as you start to get to know it, you find all these sort of little hidden restaurants and little hidden weird parks, and they're all places that unless someone tells you, you would never find them, ever. Some of the best restaurants in this town are in strip malls."
Parker has no intention of putting permanent roots down in U.S. soil. But she feels she can't leave Hollywood just yet. "What I want is to be able to come home and work, but the truth is that I can't make a living doing the Canadian films only," she said. "I think it's pretty limiting to be nationalistic about it.
"I'd love to come home. I just can't yet."
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