Molly Parker scrubs in for ‘Doc’

Actress Molly Parker likes the moment when it all falls apart, when a character loses everything. “Because, do you just give up on life?” she said. “Do you just die? Or do you change?”

Parker (“Deadwood,” “House of Cards”), 52, had thyroid cancer about a decade ago. She doesn’t talk about it often, and she’s quick to say she’s fine now. Dying wasn’t really on the table. But the treatment disrupted her endocrine system. The recovery took years. And it changed her, she said.

Cerebral, with an often feverish intensity, Parker is the rare actress who can run both very hot and quite cool. She seems to feel more than the average woman and think more too. In her 30 years in the business, she has typically gravitated toward its margins — indie films, prestige TV, when prestige TV was new. (Having said that, she did one Hallmark movie – for the money, she emphasized.)

Which is to say, she wasn’t looking to appear on a network show, let alone something as blindingly normal as a medical procedure. If the role had been offered to her 10 years ago, she would not have considered it.

“I was only going to do indie for the rest of my life,” she said.

But when her agents sent her the scripts for “Dock,” a Fox series that premieres Tuesday, she read them. Yes, it was a network show. Yes, it was a procedure. Yes, it would mean time away from her teenage son. Still, she was drawn to the story of Amy Larsen, a brilliant doctor who develops retrograde amnesia after a serious car accident. In Amy she found another woman in a moment of crisis, another woman who would choose to survive.

I met Parker one afternoon in early December. She had traveled from Los Angeles, where she lives, to New York City for a few days of press events. But she had found an hour or two to drop by Canada gallery in Chinatown. Glamorous in a fur coat, her voice soft and surprisingly low, she wandered the few rooms, admiring some photo collages by Lee Mary Manning and abstract paintings by Lily Ludlow, a friend. She had helped finance the space, opened by her friends, in its early days, using some of her first film salary.

“‘Investor’ is a more advanced word than what I made,” she said. “But I bought art from them and that’s how we started.”

Raised in a small Canadian town outside of Vancouver, British Columbia, Parker spent much of her childhood studying ballet. Although she was accepted into the biology program at a nearby college, she moved to Vancouver instead, waiting tables and taking acting classes. In 1996, she starred in the indie film Kissed, playing a necrophiliac morgue student.

“It was the most fun I’ve ever had,” she said.

For a decade she went from one indie film to the next, partly out of snobbery, partly because the big studios weren’t yet interested. “I was maybe a little too intense,” she said. But she liked life, traveling all over the world and making what she called “weird, weird, artful movies.”

She was drawn to the darkness, to characters in extremis – addicts, sex workers, women who suffered extreme loss. In her private life she was quiet, introverted to a fault. At work she could be more expressive, and for a long time it felt right.

Although she appeared in a little-seen Canadian series, “Twitch City,” her first major television role was a two-episode arc as a rabbi on “Six Feet Under.” A year or two later, she auditioned for “Deadwood,” David Milch’s revisionist western series for HBO. Beginning in 2004, she spent three seasons as Alma Garret, a laudanum addict in possession of her murdered husband’s gold claim.

Timothy Olyphant, who played her lawman love interest, recalled how easy it was to act opposite her. “Usually someone as good as her, you expect there to be some drama,” he said. But there was no drama, just an apparent ease. “She was both completely in control of the scene and at the same time completely open to it going somewhere unexpected,” he said.

After “Deadwood” was suddenly canceled, Parker tried out for a network show (“Swingtown”) but it didn’t take off, and she had roles on “Dexter” and “House of Cards.” In the years following her cancer treatment, her choices — which included a live-action “Peter Pan & Wendy” and the Netflix remake of “Lost in Space” — became somewhat less predictable.

That an actress with her indie leanings would choose to front a network show still comes as a surprise. And if “Doc” has a few quirks — the series is based on an Italian series based on a real-life case of a clinician with amnesia — it’s still very much a standard medical procedure. (At one point, a character tells Parker’s Amy, “You’ve always been a maverick who wasn’t afraid to take chances.”)

Each episode runs on two tracks as Amy solves medical mysteries while also grappling with the larger mystery of who she became in the years she can’t remember, which thrilled Parker.

“She’s going to discover who she is,” she said of Amy. “She can be anything.” This corresponded to her belief that humans are naturally diverse, or as Parker put it, “There’s no limit to how weird people are.”

“Doc” views Amy prismatically—as a mother, a lover, a colleague, a friend, a boss, an ex-wife. Barbie Kligman, the showrunner of “Doc”, had worried about casting someone to play this. “We needed the impossible,” she said. “This actress had to play all these levels at the same time.” And she had to make Amy likable, even as Amy says and does horrible things; that prism contains some very hard edges. Kligman felt that Parker could play all of these facets and was delighted when she agreed.

Making the show, which was filmed in early 2024 in Toronto, was often exhausting. The days were long and sometimes Parker would come home and just lay on the floor. But she liked the hard work, and she tried not to take out her fatigue on her teammates.

Amirah Vann, who plays Amy’s best friend, a fellow doctor, appreciated the example Parker set. “She shows up soulfully and she’s very generous,” Vann said. She began to release associated words that defined Parker for her: “Heart. Craft. Respect. Joy.”

Parker feels joy. Middle age, which used to be a death sentence for most actresses, has turned out to be more expansive than expected. And she’s finally finishing the bachelor’s degree she abandoned, this time in political science.

“I’m the happiest I’ve ever been,” she said.

Yet happiness doesn’t seem to be what drives her, in her life or especially in her work. The darkness and the possibilities that darkness offers never feel too far away.

“We all go through things and everybody suffers in the end,” Parker said. She was talking about Amy. She also talked about herself. “But if you have the capacity to get through it and change, then you have a great life because you have a perspective on your life that is not limited.”