'Doc' star Molly Parker said she wouldn't play a mother of a dead child anymore — this was the exception
For Canadian actor Molly Parker, leading the TV medical drama Doc (on Global in Canada Tuesdays at 9:00 p.m. ET, streaming on StackTV), the show is full of different story elements to play with. It starts with her character Dr. Amy Larsen's amnesia, which also affects the relationships she has with her family and coworkers, after losing eight years of her memories, and of course the impact on her career.
While that may seem like a lot to handle, Parker told Yahoo Canada hat she reminds herself that this story is based on a real person. An Italian doctor who lost 12 years of his life after a car accident.
"Whenever I get too overwhelmed, I try to remember that there was actually a person who lived this, a version of it anyway," Parker said. "But as an actor, this is a dream part."
"We're given access to all aspects of her personality and because she has changed, because her life has been defined by these two moments where she loses everything, and makes very different choices in those moments, or reacts to those situations very differently, we get to see her try on a lot of different ways of being in the world. That's fun."
One especially heartbreaking point in the series is that Amy lost the memory of her young son's death, having to instantly be launched into that grief again. Interestingly, Parker had been particularly against playing a grieving mother, before Doc came along.
"This thing of losing a child, I just shrink from it when I read it in scripts. I don't want to go there. I think I'd actually said, I'm not playing the mother of any more dead children, I'm not doing it anymore. And then this role came along," Parker said. "But what I will say is that ... this show is fun and propulsive, and it's a medical procedural, and it has all that kind of mystery going on, it also addresses themes that are so human, and grief is one of those themes."
"And I think what we get to see is grief happening to her in a number of different ways. We get to go into the flashbacks and see what Amy doesn't remember, how she dealt with it the first time, and now she has this opportunity to have a different experience with it, horrible as it is, where everyone else has gone through it already. So in a way, there's these people around her who can help her, who weren't able to help her before because they were having their own grief. It's complex, it's beautiful, it's heartbreaking, and I just feel really grateful and lucky that I get this opportunity."
After famously playing Alma Garret in the period drama Deadwood, from 2004 to 2006, there's a similarity between Alma and Amy, both women who are going through an evolution in their respective stories, and in many ways being reinvigorated in their lives.
"For me, I think, just unconsciously, I always respond to characters who we meet in the moment when they lose everything," Parker said. "And Deadwood was that, Alma Garett, when we first meet her, her husband's killed, ... and it frees her, it gives her the opportunity to be reborn as her own human being."
"But Amy, in losing her memory, is given an opportunity, not to do her life over, she's 50 years old, her life, a lot of it has happened already, but she is given an opportunity to relate to it differently, to see it differently."
As we move into Episode 8 of Doc, we see continued exploration of Amy's relationship with Dr. Richard Miller, played by Scott Wolf. While the two were close, that friendship became more contentious, but those tougher times between them are what Amy has forgotten. Additionally, we know that Richard is trying to conceal the truth about the care of a patient named Bill Dixon, hoping that those memories never return for Amy.
There's real complexity in this friendship that's an interesting exploration for Doc, including taking a particularly layered presentation of characters who may initially seem like villains.
"I am interested in why people do the things they do, and so I feel our writers are really willing to investigate all those nooks and crannies," Parker said. "And at the end, I think it's actually a really big hearted show, it has a tremendous amount of compassion for all of its characters."
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