Park­er Posey: ​‘I’m nos­tal­gic for how to real­ly meet peo­ple. It’s so dif­fer­ent now’

Few actress­es have defined the vibran­cy of the ​’90s indie film scene quite like Park­er Posey. In cult clas­sics of the decade like Dazed and Con­fused, Kick­ing and Scream­ing, The Daytrip­pers, and The House of Yes, to name just a few, Posey com­mands the screen with charis­ma and humor.

She’s an actress who always brings her own brand of play­ful ener­gy to every role, and has won a devot­ed fol­low­ing for her admirable abil­i­ty to always com­mit to the bit, whether she’s star­ring in a Christo­pher Guest improv mock­u­men­tary or pop­ping up in a big bud­get release or TV show. Posey’s most recent role, in Beau Is Afraid, finds her seduc­ing Joaquin Phoenix with a man­ic spark that makes her brief scene one of the film’s most mem­o­rable — which is no easy feat con­sid­er­ing that Ari Aster’s lat­est hor­ror sto­ry runs near­ly three hours and fea­tures all kinds of bizarre twists.

Going back to Posey’s first star­ring role, in Daisy von Scher­ler Mayer’s 1995 com­e­dy Par­ty Girl, you can tru­ly see a star being born. Posey plays Mary, a par­ty girl (of course) who reluc­tant­ly becomes a librar­i­an in order to repay her aunt for bail­ing her out after she’s arrest­ed for throw­ing an ille­gal rave (in true 1995 fash­ion), only to ulti­mate­ly dis­cov­er that she actu­al­ly loves the work.

Par­ty Girl has recent­ly got­ten a 4K restora­tion and rere­lease, and with ​’90s nos­tal­gia in full swing, and pub­lic libraries and queer com­mu­ni­ties (two things the film depicts with love and nuance) unfor­tu­nate­ly under attack, it’s tak­en on a new poten­cy. Watch­ing Par­ty Girl today, it’s a time cap­sule of a New York City filled with glit­ter, plat­form shoes, and house music, and in the mid­dle of it all is Posey — a fash­ion­able, imp­ish pres­ence who makes work­ing in a pub­lic library feel like a glam­orous fairy­tale. We spoke to the actress about the movie’s lega­cy, the mag­ic of ​’90s New York, and the joy of watch­ing screw­ball com­e­dy heroines.

Par­ty Girl real­ly embod­ies the spir­it of ​’90s New York City. What’s your take on all the ​’90s nos­tal­gia hap­pen­ing now? Do you feel nos­tal­gic for the era?

When I think of ​’90s nos­tal­gia I think of my own nos­tal­gia in the ​’90s for the ​’70s. And then I think of ​’70s nos­tal­gia which was ​’30s and ​’40s. We had this screw­ball com­e­dy and for me, I thought ​“This is going to come back in style,” and it did for a lit­tle bit — the wit­ty woman with her repar­tee and the men who love her, who she runs away from and runs back to.

In the ​’90s, I remem­ber run­ning out­side and going to the deli in my slip­pers and a slip, and you could just run out­side. It was flir­ty and mad­cap. There was this joy and this bounce. In the ​’90s there were more peo­ple on the side­walks, and work­ing on indie movies and liv­ing in a rent-con­trolled apart­ment, there was that free­dom and spon­tane­ity to walk around and go to flea mar­kets and book­stores. There was that kind of grungi­ness, and you’d run into peo­ple you knew just by walk­ing around.

I’m nos­tal­gic for how to real­ly meet peo­ple. It’s so dif­fer­ent now. I think it’s more trep­i­da­tious and care­ful. It was wild then and no one was tak­ing pic­tures. You could go out and have fun and do prat­falls on the dance floor and just be stu­pid. That flir­ta­tion and ener­gy felt real­ly great. New York has those stages where it feels like a bad boyfriend and you’re not sure if you should leave or not, but the ener­gy of peo­ple that I still encounter makes the City what it is and I love that very much.

I feel like for 20 years I’ve been real­ly nos­tal­gic and liv­ing in a bub­ble and I’m griev­ing a bit over the time. But I’m also won­der­ing if now there’s a place for me to do some­thing new, like direct a play, per­haps. I love the­ater and see­ing the whole pic­ture. I’m just an artist and I put things out there and see what comes back and if it doesn’t feel warm and cozy, bye-bye. I know there are a lot of fresh writ­ers who haven’t been dis­cov­ered and I would real­ly like to have that kind of collaboration.

What has it been like revis­it­ing Par­ty Girl almost 30 years after it was released?

Going to the pre­mière of the Par­ty Girl rere­lease, I was so emo­tion­al. It was so long ago and that was such a time in New York. I didn’t even know if I would be able to do the Q&A after, because I just got so nostalgic.

There was mag­ic and it’s still a mag­i­cal city. I was lis­ten­ing to the sound­track before going to the pre­mière and I was so touched by it. She’s gonna live her life, you know? There’s this sim­plic­i­ty. The songs had such opti­mism about city life and hold­ing onto that life and that reinvention.

It’s hard to imag­ine any­one else play­ing Mary. Was the part writ­ten with you in mind?

It wasn’t writ­ten for me specif­i­cal­ly. But I’ve got­ten that a lot about this movie because I made such strong choic­es. Daisy, the direc­tor, and Har­ry Bir­ck­may­er, the co-writer, wrote it as a screw­ball com­e­dy. I was fresh out of SUNY Pur­chase dra­ma school and most­ly doing plays so I had that phys­i­cal brain that you need for theater.

When I was young I made some bold choic­es that required step­ping up to the mate­r­i­al and I was inspired by the sassy women in old movies. I was a Ros­alind Rus­sell fan since I was a kid, and loved Katharine Hep­burn and Bar­bara Stan­wyck. They were so fun­ny, and what I loved about it was that they all got along, and they knew they were ridiculous.

With Mary, we knew there need­ed to be some­thing kind of daffy about her, chan­nel­ing the phys­i­cal­i­ty of these ladies and how they’d walk in a room, how they’d shim­my their shoul­ders a bit. I start­ed out as a dancer, so I start­ed with that phys­i­cal­i­ty of it. And me and my friends were all going out so we had all these per­son­al jokes and this way of talk­ing and vamp­ing. That kind of daffi­ness is real­ly fun to play.

In the screw­ball genre in the gild­ed class, women often did that — they were smart actors play­ing dumb. I just keep think­ing ​“daffy” and I don’t even know exact­ly what that means — but it’s just kind of emp­ty but play­ful, with some screws miss­ing. It’s a mag­i­cal thinker who’s in her own world and is liv­ing life by instinct and heart and not real­ly ques­tion­ing things.

That kind of free­dom in those movies, like 20^th Cen­tu­ry, which I love, with Car­ole Lom­bard and John Bar­ry­more — they’re just rag­ing at each oth­er and it’s so fun. It’s not mean and it’s very clever and real. And the men were idiots around these women, and they played with them and when they got mad at each oth­er you knew the actors were hav­ing fun. It’s so sexy and alive.

All the cos­tumes in Par­ty Girl are so fab­u­lous. Giv­en the low bud­get, did you wear any of your own clothes? What was the process of cos­tum­ing the movie like?

I did use some of my own clothes. I had one suit I wore in the library that was from the ​’70s — it had beige bro­cade and I wore plat­form shoes with it. There was that ​’90s/’70s/’40s lin­eage, so we looked at old movies and then I was putting flow­ers in my hair and pop­ping that ​’40s look mixed with ​’70s. And there was no grunge in the movie. Every­thing was very col­or­ful and pop­py. A lot of it was bor­rowed, like Todd Old­ham gave us stud­ded shorts that we returned imme­di­ate­ly after, and it was a big deal to buy that bright red Vivi­enne West­wood bodice top I wore in the beginning.

The cos­tum­ing was a real col­lab­o­ra­tion and it was real­ly, real­ly fun. There was this inti­ma­cy, like, ​“Come over to my apart­ment, look at all these vin­tage items I have.” We had a lot of favors on that movie, and peo­ple want­ed to sup­port New York in that way. My grand­moth­er, who was like a ​’40s movie star, she real­ly dressed up and she made her own clothes. She’d copy the clothes she saw in Neiman Mar­cus and put her high-heeled boots on and light a cig­a­rette and look like she just stepped out of a TV show — and she had nowhere to go. I real­ly called on her dur­ing that.

Do you get a lot of librar­i­ans telling you how much they love Par­ty Girl?

I do. It’s a wild thing. I’m not say­ing I get five librar­i­ans a day, but when I’m in the City walk­ing about, Par­ty Girl has late­ly seemed to be in the air. It’s women of all ages. God, there’s such a gap of mate­r­i­al for women. And this movie is all about a woman who likes to dress up and social­ize and wear lip­stick and read and she’s fun­ny and likes to dance and she’s smart.
We made that movie for those kids who want to dance in front of the TV and don’t feel like they belong and want to leave their town and move to New York to live their lives. It was made with such a great spir­it. I’m real­ly hap­py it’s had such a resur­gence. It’s so sweet.