Molly Parker Is Getting To Do It All With ‘Doc’

[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for Doc.]

Summary

• In the Fox medical drama ‘Doc,’ Dr. Amy Larsen (Molly Parker) faces challenges post-brain injury, including memory loss and a secret romance.
• The show explores the complexities of Amy’s character, who is forced to rebuild her life and redefine her identity.
• The potential for future seasons lies in Amy’s vulnerability, identity formation, and deep character exploration within a medical procedural.

The Fox medical drama Doc follows Dr. Amy Larsen (Molly Parker), the brilliant but demanding Chief of Internal Medicine, as she pieces her life back together after suffering a brain injury from a car crash that erases the last eight years of her memory. No longer interested in being the woman who pushed everyone away after an unimaginable loss, colleagues are no longer sure where they stand, her best friend, neuropsychiatrist Dr. Gina Walker (Amirah Vann), isn’t sure how much to tell her, and her secret romance with Dr. Jake Heller (Jon Ecker) is now even a secret to her. The one connection she’s still holding onto is her family until she’s rocked to learn that she’s been divorced from husband Dr. Michael Hamda (Omar Metwally) for four years. So, Amy does the only thing she can, focusing on becoming a doctor again and figuring out what she wants for her life now.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Parker talked about playing a character in the process of rebuilding her life, telling a story over different time frames, shooting the car crash, exploring the relationship between mother and daughter, the love triangle, the tricky relationship with Dr. Richard Miller (Scott Wolf), and the potential for everything still to explore in future seasons. She also discussed her time on Deadwood and how meaningful the experience was.

‘Doc’ Is a Character Drama Wrapped in a Medical Procedural

Collider: This character is a challenging protagonist, but if it were a male character at the center of this, no one would question his behavior or how he acts. It’s so interesting to not only watch her, but to see how everybody reacts to her and to see how they don’t know what to do when she’s different after her accident. When this came your way, how much did you know? Did you have any idea just how deep you’d get into that?

MOLLY PARKER: What’s exciting about the show is that we meet this woman at the moment when she loses everything. She loses her memory, but comes to find that she’s also lost all these other parts of her life and parts of herself. That’s a really rich, exciting, fulfilling place as a departure point. We get to start at that place where the person is forced to either just give up and die or change, and that’s an exciting place to start. Because the situation of the show is so extreme and because we’re dealing with memory loss, there are a number of different versions of this woman. Certainly, her core is the same, but her behavior and her personality change.

This woman’s life is defined by these two moments where she has lost everything. To me, what’s great about the show is we get to see her make both choices. We get to see her go down the very dark path of what that does to her, and then we get to see her not do it differently because she doesn’t get to go back and redo her life, but she gets to shift her understanding of herself. She becomes a mystery to herself. What would otherwise be internal work, or women’s work, gets externalized because of the situation. She has to look outside herself to find out who she was, who she became and what she did, so it’s externalized in that way.

This show has so much potential because there’s this really complicated, rich character work to do because sometimes she’s really mean and horrible and nasty. And yet, we don’t have to apologize for that because that’s not all she is. We get to see all aspects of her, like we all have. In different relationships or different dynamics, those get turned up or turned down, and all of that happens in the container of this medical procedural. I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s a genre that people obviously love because it really works. At its best, it is this great container for that really deep character work. It’s also fun, it’s juicy, there’s a love triangle, and there are super high stakes.

When you sign on to do a TV show, you’re really only signing on for the beginning of the story because you don’t know what the middle or the end will be. Were there conversations about making sure she keeps that edge to her and that she doesn’t suddenly become a nicer person?

PARKER: Yeah, absolutely. When our showrunner and writer Barbie Kligman first pitched it, she talked about it as This Is Us meets House meets Regarding Henry, which is the way people talk about things. The show is told in a number of different time frames. Because of that, we get to see her in many different forms, and I don’t think that’s gonna go away. I think that’s a fundamental part of the show. What I love about these kinds of shows is when they do the mystery part really well, and there’s gonna be mystery illness every week. This woman is a brilliant diagnostician. That’s what she’s really good at. But she’s also a mystery to herself, and that, to me, is fun.

Obviously, you’re not in the car when it’s flipping in the air, but what was it like to shoot the scenes involving the accident? Is it a little bit out of body when you know you’re filming a scene like that?

PARKER: It was super out of body. When we shot it, I had laryngitis and I was really sick. At one point, they hung me upside down in front of a green screen in a harness. It was dreadful. It looks really cool. Thank God for stunt people.

Molly Parker Loves Exploring the Layers of the Mother-Daughter Relationship in ‘Doc’

I love that we get to see her form this new relationship with her daughter. There’s something really beautiful about her getting a chance to make that right. What was that like to explore?

PARKER: That relationship with her daughter is really interesting. You were talking about what female characters are allowed to be before they become “unlikable,” which is something you can do in film, but it’s a very hard thing to pull off on television. One of the things that we find unforgivable, as a society, is not being a good parent. To not be a good mother or to have gone through a period where she’s abdicated that role a little bit is something that is tricky to pull off in a way where we still have compassion for the character because we are so judgmental about women in that way. This woman is doing the best she can, and the best she can do is just not die. That’s so heavy and horrible, but I think that’s true for her.

And so, she just throws herself into her work, and that’s the best she can do. And then, she gets this other moment to reconnect. She doesn’t get to do those things over. None of us do. But we can always make changes, going forward. I think there’s also a lot of grief in watching your kids get older. I have an 18-year-old, and we’re really close. We have a great relationship. But part of me mourns that the little guy is gone. He’s not that little guy anymore. He’s grown. He’s six feet tall. And it makes me so sad sometimes. I can relate to that, and I think a lot of people can relate to that. When you have a baby, you think, “This is it. This is the rest of my life.” But it’s not. It’s this one era of your life. It’s these 20 years, but then they’re grown. They’re still a part of your life, but that keeps changing. The thing that gives me hope and the thing that we’re finding in the show is that it’s so great, having a relationship with this young adult. But she’s failed her daughter, and that’s a truth that they need to confront.

Another really interesting relationship in this show is the one between Amy and Sonya (Anya Banerjee). Sonya is clearly holding things against her and judging her for things that Amy doesn’t remember, and then they end up on this case that so personally affects Sonya that it’s a real turning point for their relationship. What was the episode like to shoot?

PARKER: That was great. Anya, who plays Sonya, is this wonderful young actor from New Zealand. She’s really brilliant. She just killed it in that episode. She did such a great job. It’s a really interesting and tricky dynamic between the two of them. On the one hand, yes, Amy became not a very nice person. On the other hand, she’s a boss, she’s that woman’s boss, and she’s a tough boss. It’s a really serious job. The job is important, so her expectations of the people who work under her are extremely high. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have a lot of compassion, at that point in her life, for them or herself. We get to see Amy growing, and we get to see Sonya growing too.

When you have a love triangle, it’s especially compelling when both options are good people. Aside from the fact that her ex-husband should be thinking about his new wife who happens to be pregnant at home, these are both decent guys.

PARKER: Because, in the end, it’s not about them. Their story is about them. The person who’s better for her is gonna depend on who she becomes. One of the things that I think is quite lovely about how they’ve rendered the Jake character for her is that she was not able to be vulnerable with anyone in her life, but for some reason, she was able to do that with him, just a little bit. And for some reason, he was able to make that safe for her to do with him. I think that’s gonna be really interesting, going forward. Obviously, this is an incredibly extreme TV situation, but when you date somebody who is recently out of another relationship, there are often three people still in the relationship. There are lots of juicy, fun problems there.

The dynamic with Richard stands out because it’s a one-sided adversarial relationship that she doesn’t understand.

PARKER: He’s fighting this ghost, this version of her that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. He’s so full of fear that she’ll remember who she was and what she knows about him. But what that dynamic does is that it actually really shines a light on how he’s not just the villain. We really come to understand why this man did the things that he did, and it’s tragic. He makes a mistake, but it’s always the cover-up that gets you. And Scott [Wolf] is so good. Where that character gets to, by the end of the season, I just thought he was marvelous in that.

Molly Parker Sees Potential and Possibilities for Where ‘Doc’ Could Go in Future Seasons

By the end of the season, Amy is left in a place that’s still very unsettled and unresolved. There is definitely room for things to continue in another season. What would you be most interested in exploring next for her? Do you know what could come next? Are there things that you specifically want to dig in deeper into?

PARKER: To me, this show has so much potential because of where it begins and because of the memory loss. In that, all kinds of things could happen. When Amy is first confronted with her amnesia, it forces her to become vulnerable with other people in a way that she has not been for a long time. That’s a part of herself that she really shut down. She was tragically self-sufficient, which I completely relate to. Because she doesn’t know who she is, she has to listen to everyone else. They tell her who she became. She has to trust them. She has to believe people. By the end of the season, we see her go, “I’m starting to know who I am again,” and to challenge that a little more. That stuff about identity and how we form our identity is interesting to me. Typically, by the time one is middle age, your identity is pretty formed. With this woman, that’s a process she has to go through again, and that’s an interesting process to watch. I think the first couple episodes of the show are wonderful, and they’re very emotional. It’s a lot of setting that scene. Once we get to the third episode, we really get into what the show is gonna be, and it’s propulsive after that and a little more fun. I’m into exploring the fun parts of this format.

You’ve spent a good amount of time playing characters in Lost in Space, House of Cards and Deadwood, which was really the longest run you’ve had with a specific character. Does that still feel like it was a special experience? Is that one of those projects that you think will always hold a special place in your heart?

PARKER: Absolutely, and I wish it had been longer. It really wasn’t. It’s only three seasons. But then, we came back and did the movie, 20 years later. That role and that entire experience was formational for me. It was the first real TV role I did after many, many years of doing independent film. At the very, very beginning of my career, I played people’s girlfriends and people’s daughters on little TV stuff, and I didn’t really like it. And then, I had this opportunity to do an indie film, and that was like, “Oh, this is what I wanna do,” because it was just exciting and there was character stuff you could do. When Deadwood came, it was David Milch. He wrote that whole thing. It seemed like it came fully formed out of him. I was just incredibly lucky. I’m proud of Deadwood. I’m proud to have been a part of it.

Doc airs on Fox and is available to stream on Hulu. Check out the trailer:

Watch on Hulu