Parker Posey at the world premiere of The White Lotus Season 3. Photo / Getty Images
Playing the rich, narcissistic matriarch Victoria Ratliff, the actress is one of the stars of TV’s hottest series - and she’s having the time of her life.
Even before the latest series of The White Lotus hit our screens, memes of Parker Posey’s character - the prescription-drug-addled, wealthy matriarch Victoria Ratliff - were colonising the internet, featuring Posey announcing: “Someone stole my lorazepam. I’m going to have to drink myself to sleep.”
Part Blanche DuBois, part Sue Ellen from Dallas, the southern belle is staying in a villa at the White Lotus, Thailand, with her husband (Jason Isaacs), who is secretly grappling with career implosion back home in North Carolina, and their three squabbling young adult children. “Victoria’s in a dream state,” Posey, 56, says. “She’s brought her pills, she could be anywhere really. She’s very narcissistic and insular, but she’s also a steel magnolia, the wilting woman who’s also a ball-buster, using all her feminine wiles.”
Victoria certainly slots perfectly into the White Lotus creator Mike White’s extraordinary universe. Now in its third season, it again turns the spotlight on the deeply unpretty world of the super-rich as they converge in another eponymous luxury resort, this time in jungle-clad Thailand. As for the previous series set in Hawaii and Sicily, the actors spent seven months living in the hotel where most of the filming took place (this time the Four Seasons Resort Koh Samui where guests pay £15,000 [$25,800] a night for a villa). “The art director said to me, ‘Welcome to the golden cage!’” Posey recalls.
“White Lotus puts this cultural eye on a class of people and a way of living, and Mike’s packed a punch with this - it’s like the first season was a fluke, we all loved the second, so the third has to be full-on,” she continues. “He works from this place of humour and pathos and edginess right into the darkness and wildness.”
During filming Posey shared a two-bedroom villa with Michelle Monaghan, who plays Jaclyn, a famous actress on a (bitchy) girls’ holiday. “Filming was such a tidal wave of authentic experience - very exotic and magical and alive, and it really was an endurance test. The heat was pretty intense. In my first scene I wore a long-sleeved dress and they needed a hairdryer between takes because the sweat shows through. There were all these stories of people seeing snakes. Walton [Goggins, who plays the sleazy Rick Hatchett] saw a monitor lizard eat a frog. Often I felt, aargh - like Tippi Hedren in The Birds.”
She starts laughing. “There was a piece of fish that left me and Sam Nivola, who plays my youngest son, on a few weeks of plain rice and pasta with the D-word and constipation alternating … [People] were always going to the hospital and coming back like they’d had the time of their lives. Thai hospitals were so nice, you could do everything there … you could get Botox and medicine easily, and waiting in line wasn’t a thing.” She checks herself. “I’m giving you a monologue, but I hope I’m painting a good picture.”
By turns ebullient and offbeat - very much like many of the characters she has portrayed - Posey is talking over Zoom from the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where she has decamped from her farmhouse in upstate New York for a White Lotus publicity junket accompanied by an old buddy, Jason, a hair and make-up artist, whom I see pottering about in the background. “Come and say hi to Julia, Jason!” she commands, before telling me about staying here once with her now deceased dog, Gracie - a mix of bichon frisé, poodle and Maltese and previously her constant companion on the front row.
Dubbed “queen of the indies” by Time magazine back in 1997, Posey is renowned for her dozens of ditsy-yet-spiky roles in groundbreaking low-budget films such as Dazed and Confused (in which she played the monstrous cheerleader), Best in Show (prototypical “Karen” dog owner) and Party Girl (club kid turned hip librarian). Almost as famous for her quirky style, today she oozes eccentric glamour in a black and white Vivienne Westwood top and trousers that are a copy of a pair by Electric Feathers that she had made by a Thai tailor. Her eyes are shielded by rimless, round, rose-lensed sunglasses that she removes to show me her (invisible) bags after she accidentally bought the wrong type of Peter Thomas Roth eye patches. “Not the hydrating kind. So I’m not having a martini tonight.”
Previous White Lotus stars (think Jennifer Coolidge, Leo Woodall, Will Sharpe and Theo James) have seen their careers turbo-boosted by the show’s global reach. Fabulous news for Posey, who has long been refreshingly honest about her career’s downsides - not least since the cool-sounding “indie” label not only left her struggling to pay the bills (she earned US$75 [$230] a day filming Party Girl in 1995, for instance, in which she was the movie’s lead), but also made mainstream Hollywood reluctant to cast her. “Something new would come up, like a three-scene part as the wife of Matt Damon in some big movie, and I’d go, God, why didn’t I get cast in that? … The response was, ‘You’re too much of an indie queen,’” she said in 2018.
Yet now her star is on a rapid reascent. Shortly she’s off to Easter Island to star as John Malkovich’s wife in the new Martin McDonagh film, Wild Horse Nine. “This is a total new phase. You get work, you don’t get work for a while. But my mom said every woman has to reinvent herself in her forties. I don’t think people watch films any more, but there’s so much excitement around White Lotus. It’s such a different culture we’re in, it’s all about the memeable, what’s in the zeitgeist, what’s making a splash.”
Like Victoria Ratliff, Posey is from the south, having grown up in Louisiana, the daughter (she has a twin brother) of a housewife and a Vietnam veteran turned car salesman she describes as “domineering and emotionally absent”. In 1992 she moved to New York to act and became one of that decade’s It girls, starring in the hippest films and walking the red carpet in kooky outfits that combined vintage and couture in a way that prefigured Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw by several years.
Around the dawn of the millennium, though, funding for her style of intelligent, experimental films dried up. Since then, despite scores of film credits, she has often lived hand-to-mouth, at one point having just $2 in her bank account. Posey has never married or had children. She tells me how she loved befriending the Thai female staff at the Four Seasons. “I was really touched going to another country and having similarities with women there. They’d go, ‘I don’t need a man. If a man does not give to me what I need, then bye-bye!’”
In recent years she has spent a lot of time in Mississippi caring for her elderly mother; before that her father suffered for 20 years from prostate cancer, which they believe was caused by contact with Agent Orange in Vietnam. “That anticipatory grief wreaked havoc. I had, of course, help and therapy but it was still hard.” A year after her father’s death in 2018 she lost her dog, Gracie. “So it was a bubble of grief. But now I feel like I’m coming out of that. We get older and look back and can say, ‘Oh, that was a period of maybe seven years and during that I evolved.’”
A hardcore Gen Xer, Posey needed time to adjust “to the culture changing. We’re transitioning into new spaces really quickly and there was so much grief around things like communicating through texts and New York not being the same as it used to be.” Right now she is enjoying discovering pockets of creativity in fire-ravaged Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of good energy here. People are hugging, everyone’s asking, ‘How are you?’ You make sense of [the changing culture] in ways that are mystical. You can’t be a victim. We’re here to struggle.”
Personally she’s in a far better place. “There’s been a lot of healing in my family.” Menopause also left her feeling “settled. By the time I turned 30 I felt I’d lived two lives, I’d really pushed myself. But at this age your energy is really important to you, so you can say yes or no to things because you know what feeds you. There’s more self-acceptance of your idiosyncrasies and what makes you happy. We have our lens and point of view and stay with friends that create a similar space.”
After years of shuttling between her Manhattan flat and the country farmhouse, she quit the former - so much associated with her youthful identity - for good. “It was too much to carry both. Now I need to put more windows in my kitchen and open it up a bit so I can hop on the counter and look at the birds. I’m obsessed with deVOL kitchens. But I still love the city, I go and stay with friends.”
Having recently discovered the importance of self-care, Posey found Thailand was the ideal place to indulge herself. “I wasn’t good at all that until now, but now I had all these massages, I got on board with all the supplements I needed, I did sound baths, reiki, Pilates. It felt needed. And the Thai culture is just so wise, it makes you feel, oh, I was so stupid taking this stuff personally.
“It’s all a path and it’s about protecting yourself,” she continues. She has recently been thinking about a close friend, the writer Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally…), who gave Posey a part in her film You’ve Got Mail and instructed her to embrace her unconventionality. “I considered Nora my mentor. I remember her at my age saying, ‘Parker, I love my bed, I can’t leave it.’ I remember thinking then, wow, I can barely sit still for a manicure. But now getting into bed is everything. I’m processing and appreciating it all. I’m just grateful.”
Written by: Julia Llewellyn Smith
© The Times of London
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