It's billed as "a Hell of a place to make your fortune." No, it's not another reality TV show. It's Deadwood, a new, big-budget HBO western series debuting tomorrow night at 10 p.m. on The Movie Network and out West on Movie Central.
Deadwood is set in 1876, two weeks after Custer's last stand at the Little BigHorn. Located on a tract of stolen land in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the town is in the grip of gold fever. The place is stinkin' with outlaws, greenhorns, miners, prostitutes and even a few ex-lawmen.
Historical characters are mixed with fictional ones in executive producer David Milch's (NYPD Blue) oater. Keith Carradine plays Wild Bill Hickok, with Robin Weigert as Calamity Jane. Timothy Oliphant, as a former sheriff, and Ian McShane, as an ornery barkeep, also lead the cast.
"It sort of becomes the Ian McShane Show," says Molly Parker, the modest Canadian in the cast. "He runs that saloon and it's the engine of the show."
Parker, a native of Maple Ridge, B.C., jumped at the chance to work with Milch. "It was the easiest job I ever got," she told The Sun earlier this month on a Toronto visit.
Parker basically spoke with Milch for 25 minutes and he offered her the job. "I don't think he's seen anything I ever had done, he just had an intuitive sense. I did have to test for HBO, but he called and told me, 'If they say no, I'm not doing the show.' "
Parker plays Alma Garrett, a prim-and-proper lady whose life takes a dramatic turn in Deadwood.
"She's an incredibly bright woman but she's also a Saturday, March 20, 2004," says Parker. Garrett was hooked on laudanum, an opium prescribed for "women's troubles" at the time.
"What's amazing about this woman is that she gets to be reborn in this place where there's no law and there is no society and there's is no structure. She can become anyone she wants to be -- and so can everyone, actually, all of the characters."
Parker sees Deadwood more as a spiritual story than as a conventional Western. Milch, in fact, originally pitched HBO on a story about the decline of the Roman Empire. If you want to read parallels into today's morally bankrupt society, they're there, she says.
After a steady career in quirky, independent films (Waking The Dead, Men With Brooms), the 31-year-old really wasn't looking for TV work. Her agent had to talk her into a couple of guest star stints on Six Feet Under where she played an attractive rabbi. After years of relative obscurity, she was shocked at the response on the street to the role. "People have these borderline inappropriate relationships with HBO shows," she says. "They're so into them. I was just in a couple of scenes and people still come up to me at the grocery store and say, "'You're the rabbi from Six Feet Under!' I've done 25 films and I'm the rabbi from Six Feet Under! This is the power of television."
Parker had never even seen Six Feet Under. Now, after starring in Iron Jawed Angels, she's firmly entrenched at HBO.
She says Deadwood is the biggest production she's ever worked on. "We have 150 extras every day. The town set goes on for four blocks. We spent seven months shooting 12 episodes."
Not bad, considering she's breezed through some 25-day film shoots in her career.
Best of all, the set is just a 40-minute drive from her home in L.A. She lives there with husband Matt Bissonette, a director.
Then there's the wardrobe. Parker says after two hours of hair and makeup, it took her and an assistant 25 minutes to lace her into a corset every day.
"It nearly killed me the first month," she says.
"It was so hot last July, I thought I was going to die in that costume. As an actress, it really instructs you as to what it was like to be a woman at that time. You can't move or yell or cry. No wonder women used to faint back then."
The experience gave her new understanding of the power of costume and fantasy. "I'd get hot and hike up seven layers of skirt so my ankle would show and people would go, 'Wow, that's sexy.' I've done scenes where I had no clothes on and didn't get that reaction."
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