Love her or hate her, Hollywood’s indie queen is making waves in the third season of The White Lotus
Parker Posey has a story she loves to tell. In interviews over the past decade, the actress has recounted a conversation with her agent in which she questioned why she kept missing out on roles in major Hollywood productions—like playing “Matt Damon’s ex-wife for two or three scenes in an action movie,” she joked to Vogue in 2023. “Finally, I asked my agent, ‘Just tell me what’s going on.’ What was the response? I didn’t really understand,” Posey told the New Yorker a year earlier. “Then they said, ‘Oh, the studio says you’re too much of an indie queen.’”
It’s clear that the head that wears the indie crown is heavy.
But perhaps Posey’s reign is finally coming to an end. The latest installment of The White Lotus, HBO’s hit mystery satire on the lives of the well-to-do, is likely to be one of the Posey’s most mainstream and widely watched film yet. She plays Victoria Ratliff, a pill-popping mother with a thick North Carolina accent, who is vacationing with her family at a luxury wellness resort in Thailand. When her lorazepam runs out, and the rug is slowly pulled out from under the Ratliffs for reasons entirely of her own making, Victoria is finally forced to confront a harsh reality that is pressing down on her like a tsunami. It’s only natural that critics and viewers have positioned Posey’s spoiled, over-the-top character as the natural successor to Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid, the self-absorbed fan favorite who appeared in the show’s first two seasons before (spoiler alert) meeting her end in the waters off Sicily. Like Coolidge, Posey draws on her extensive comedy background to deliver all of the show’s best and wittiest lines, such as
as when Victoria questions the company she will have to share on a luxury yacht by asking, “Are they nice people? Just because people are rich doesn’t mean they aren’t bad people.” Or when she defends her questions about the behavior of local Buddhist monks by declaring, “Look at the Catholics! Organized religion and deviant sexual behavior go hand in hand.”
As Coolidge basks in a career resurgence thanks to her two-time Emmy-winning work in The White Lotus, all eyes are now on Posey, who happens to be Coolidge’s comedy co-star in Christopher Guest’s spoof documentaries Best in Show (2000) and For Your Consideration (2006). Could this role finally bring Posey the praise, awards, and career stability she has long deserved?
As Coolidge basked in a career resurgence thanks to her double Emmy-winning performance in The White Lotus, all eyes were now on Posey, who happened to be Coolidge’s comedic co-star in Christopher Guest’s spoof documentaries Best in Show (2000) and For Your Consideration (2006). Could this role finally bring Posey the acclaim, awards, and career stability she’d long deserved?
Almost every story written about Posey seemed to be bound by law to call her “Queen of Indies,” a nickname first coined by Richard Corliss for Time magazine in 1997. By that year, she had appeared in dozens of independent films, including Dazed and Confused (1993), Clockwatchers (1997), and Party Girl (1995), her first leading role. For The House of Yes (1997), in which she played a mentally disturbed woman haunted by Jackie Kennedy and her own brother, she even won a special award at Sundance, a film festival with which she would eventually become synonymous. Yet mainstream fame and success eluded her. She lost leading roles to Sandra Bullock (1994’s Speed ), Janeane Garofalo (1994’s Reality Bites ), and Renée Zellweger (1996’s Jerry Maguire ). (Such humiliations continued decades later, when she was replaced by Marisa Tomei in The Realistic Joneses just as it transferred to Broadway in 2014.) “How could someone who had It—the looks, the presence, the acting ability—not have it all? Because the major studios weren’t in love with her yet,” Corliss wrote in Time. “She’s too independent for the big studios, too edgy to get the serious roles that win critics awards.”
In addition to starring in little-known indies like Broken English (2007) and Price Check (2012), Posey has built her career largely by playing supporting roles (sometimes villainous, sometimes goofy, but often fan-favorite) in films like You’ve Got Mail (1998), Scream 3 (2000), Josie and the
Pussycats (2001), Blade: Trinity (2004), and Superman Returns (2006). On television, she has had recurring guest roles on shows like Will & Grace, Boston Legal, The Good Wife, and Search Party, but her biggest project, Netflix’s reboot of Lost in Space, had little cultural impact and was not renewed after three seasons. She carries the unfortunate stigma of working with two famous Hollywood men shortly before they were blacklisted in the industry—Woody Allen (2015’s Irrational Man and 2016’s Café Society) and Louis C.K. (a four-episode role as his girlfriend in 2012’s Louie)—and has publicly bristled when asked about them. In 2015, she also appeared in eight episodes of a show I’d never heard of, Granite Flats , created for a network I’d never heard of, BYUtv, which is owned and operated by Brigham Young University. (“I wouldn’t say ‘no’ to anything if it came along and paid me and kept me going!’” she joked in 2012.)
