Parker Posey nursed a recent bout of jet lag by doing something she admits she’s never been good at — watching herself on television.
During a brief trip home from filming Season 3 of HBO’s “The White Lotus” in Thailand, Posey buckled under pressure from her friends to cue up Prime Video’s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” for which she is nominated for her first-ever Emmy. While she attended the premiere back in January where she saw the first two episodes, she hadn’t watched the rest of it until her friends convinced her to do so.
Days later, she was still singing its praises. “It is just so satisfying watching great actors do great work with great writing,” she tells Variety. “It is very mature. It is funny and witty and subtle in all the right ways.”
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The Television Academy agreed, handing the spy series 16 nominations, three of them in Posey’s guest actress category alone (alongside Michaela Coel and Sarah Paulson). Director Hiro Murai recently described the lineup of guest stars — which also includes Ron Perlman and John Turturro, “the Avengers of character actors.”
While this may be her first Emmy nomination, Posey is no stranger to standing out in an ensemble, having come up as a player in Christopher Guest films like “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show.”
She joins “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” in episode 4 when married spy partners John (Donald Glover) and Jane (Maya Erskine) have dinner with Other John (Wagner Moura) and Other Jane (Posey), another pair of undercover agents from their shadowy organization. The seasoned and effortlessly cool couple both fascinate and unnerve our main Smiths over the course of dinner, before the experienced duo tricks them into completing a wildly dangerous mission.
In the game of spies, being unknowable is everything, and Posey says they crafted her Jane as an “elusive, chic kind of woman,” who wears her personality — and a severely straight haircut that often conceals half her face — like armor.
“She exudes that way that women intimidate with their wealth and their beauty and what they have,” Posey says. “It was really fun to send that type of woman up with this Jane. They act a certain way and talk a certain way. It is a specific kind of female power, and it was fun to really get to lay it on thick.”
Plus, it was a given to cast her. Showrunner and co-creator Francesca Sloane recently told Variety that they searched for actors she and Glover personally admired to play the characters John and Jane would worship. “I’ve idolized her since I was a preteen,” Sloane said of Posey. “She is the ‘It Girl’ for me.”
But this isn’t Posey’s first brush with “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.” Back in 2004, she auditioned for Doug Liman’s movie starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, despite admitting she gets a “little shocked by action stuff and loud noises.”
“I’m more of a BritBox and cozy shows kind of person,” she says with a laugh.
In the end, she didn’t get the part and told herself it was because the role simply got cut from the film. “It is one of those stories we tell ourselves to move on to the next one,” she says.
But when she finally watched the movie last year to prepare for the series, she learned that the part wasn’t cut after all. “I realized, ‘Oh, so Kerry Washington totally got cast, and you just didn’t get the part.’ That’s what really happened, and she’s great in it!”
Two decades later, Posey was offered the role of Other Jane, who reemerges alongside Other John in the season finale with orders to “finalize” (aka kill) Glover and Erskine’s couple. After a struggle leaves Other John blinded, Other Jane stalks their adversaries’ bullet-ridden home to finish the job, but a cliffhanger shootout leaves her fate unknown.
Amazon Prime Video has been equally vague about whether Season 2 will continue this story or focus on new characters in an anthology format. But Posey is open to returning, if for no other reason than to reunite with her partner in crime on screen.
“It is so rare that I get to play part of a couple,” she says. “I often play the kind of woman who is alone a lot, so having that dynamic and that scene partner in Wagner was just so much fun.”
If she were to return, she has some suggestions for what Other Jane might be up to.
“If we have another season, my Jane Smith may be totally different,” Posey says. “She may be like a rural Jane Smith working at a hardware store, living a quiet life. Who knows?”
Until she gets an answer to Other Jane’s fate, Posey will pass the time completing a stint in another sweeping ensemble: the cast of creator Mike White’s “The White Lotus.” At the mere mention of the show, which has taken home 15 Emmys, she gets nervous she might spill too much about the shrouded-in-secrecy series.
“I’m still working on it, but I can say as it comes to a close that I don’t think I’ve ever been given such an exotic, exciting, challenging, endurance-testing job, and I am so grateful to Mike for it,” she says. “I have grown a lot, and I fell in love with Thailand.”
