Parker Posey Doesn't Know If She Can Live Here

The actress contemplates aging and feeling out of place in the city.

- CHOIRE SICHA

PARKER POSEY has been deeply associated with New York since the '90s for cool indie roles from Party Girl to The Doom Generation to a long string of excellent films by Christopher Guest and Hal Hartley. But her career is more textured and strange than that. It entails popping into superhero franchises and rom-coms such as You've Got Mail and, most recently, the horror-drama Beau Is Afraid, in which she drops in like a torpedo in the third act. The thing is Posey hasn't spent much time in New York lately. First, there was shooting Lost in Space for Netflix in Vancouver for ages, then post-pandemic, she started staying more frequently at her place in the boonies a few hours north of the city. Now, at 54, the way in which New York can feel like it belongs to the young is making itself obvious to her.

What do you miss about the New York City of 1992-93?

When it was fun, it felt like a community. Do communities only happen in your 20s, then they kind of fade away?

Is that it, or is it you?

I think it's-[waves iPhone].

It might be phones.

I do think so. Like, when Party Girl came out 27 years ago.

It was re-released in theaters this spring. How did that feel?

Feels great. You know, it's so long ago. It's like, Oh, they're having this rereleased? Yeah, well, where did they find the original film? Some company bought it, distributed it. Then they sold it, but they have homes in the Hamptons now. It just reminds me of the scamminess of showbiz.

So there are some negative associations there, as they say in therapy.