Molly Parker plays women who cannot say what they want, and she lets us watch them not say it. In Deadwood that stillness holds its own against the loudest talkers on television, and it remains the fullest use of her we have seen.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Alma Garret listen. The camp in Deadwood (2004) is full of men who talk in paragraphs, and Molly Parker spends much of the first season standing in a corset and a good dress while they do it. She does not fidget and she does not perform attention. She waits, and something behind the eyes keeps working, so that when she does speak the sentence lands harder than it would from anyone louder. Ian McShane's Al Swearengen gets the speeches. Parker gets the silences, and by the end of the first season we found we were waiting for hers more than for his.
She has said the clothes taught her the part: "putting on those clothes, right away there is this physical impediment that you have to fight through in order to just live as a full human being." That is Alma exactly, and it is close to a description of the whole career. Parker's women are held in by something, a marriage, a drug, a room full of men with more power, and what she plays is the effort of living inside the constraint rather than the moment of breaking it.
The career began in Canadian television in the early 1990s, after ballet and drama training in Vancouver, in the small parts that exist to be somebody's daughter. Kissed (1996) changed that: a lead as Sandra Larson, a medical student with a sexual attachment to the dead, in a film built to provoke and one of two she made with director Lynne Stopkewich. It got her noticed, and it announced an appetite for parts other actors would have thought about twice.
Then Deadwood, three seasons with David Milch, with whom she has worked four times. Her scenes with Paula Malcomson's Trixie are where the series is most patient and least showy; they deny us the easy pleasure of a commanding speech, and they reward the viewer who stays with them. The risk of this kind of acting is that it can be mistaken for doing nothing, and in the first hours of Deadwood a newcomer may well think so of her, as of Timothy Olyphant's Bullock. Give it a few episodes.
Since then television has had most of her: Jacqueline Sharp in House of Cards (2014–2016), Maureen Robinson in Lost in Space (2018–2021), Arlette James in 1922 (2017), and a lead in Doc (2025). We have not reviewed these and will not judge them here, but the shape is consistent: long-form, ensemble, a woman who has to wait for her turn. If you have never seen Deadwood, start there, and watch what she does while the men are talking.
Biography
Molly Parker is a Canadian actress. Born on 30 June 1972 in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, she trained in ballet from a young age and later studied acting at Vancouver's Gastown Actors' Studio. Her uncle, an actor, helped secure her first roles in Canadian television.
She received early critical attention for her lead role in the film Kissed (1996). Parker is known for playing Alma Garret in the HBO series Deadwood (2004–2006) and its 2019 film continuation, Jacqueline Sharp in the Netflix series House of Cards (2014–2016), and Maureen Robinson in Lost in Space (2018–2021). She was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for House of Cards.
