SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from “…Must Come Down,” the Season 1 finale of Fox’s “Doc.”
Molly Parker never expected to lead a project that she considers as mainstream as a network procedural. In her 30 years in the business, the Canadian actor has tended to gravitate toward the margins, making a name for herself as an indie darling (“Kissed,” “Sunshine”) and a strong supporting player in the early years of prestige TV (“Deadwood,” “House of Cards”).
But in spring 2023, just days before the writers went on strike in Hollywood, Parker took a meeting with “Doc” executive producers Barbie Kligman and Hank Steinberg about headlining their new gender-flipped Fox adaptation of a popular Italian medical drama. At the time, Parker could not bear the thought of spending time away from her teenage son — who was then going into his junior year in high school in Los Angeles — in order to shoot a months-long project in Toronto. However, by the time both the writers and actors strikes ended six months later, Parker realized that she could not stop thinking about the character. (Her son also declared that he wanted to go to art school in New York, so he would eventually be on the same coast as her.)
In “Doc,” Parker stars as Dr. Amy Larsen, a brilliant yet abrasive physician who, following a late-night car accident, wakes up with no recollection of the past eight years of her life. Over the course of the show’s 10-episode first season, as she works to get recertified in the same hospital where she was once the chief of internal medicine, Amy must come to terms with the tragic loss of her son, Danny, which not only turned her into a hardened shell of herself but also led to the dissolution of her marriage to Dr. Michael Hamda (Omar Metwally) and an estranged relationship with their daughter Katie (Charlotte Fountain-Jardim).
While she had decided privately years before that she never wanted to play the mother of a dead child again, since she had done in other past roles, Parker felt “Doc” was going to offer a “delicate and complicated look at grief” — a universal phenomenon that did not necessarily change this seemingly ordinary woman for the better. “This is a woman whose life has been defined by these two very extreme traumas, these moments when she feels that she’s lost everything. Those, to me, are the most interesting places to meet a character,” Parker tells Variety.
In Tuesday’s season finale, while the doctors rush to treat victims of a train derailment caused by a suicidal driver who parked his car on the tracks, Amy decides that she needs to apologize to the affable widow of Bill Dixon — the man her colleague, Chief Dr. Richard Miller (Scott Wolf), said she had killed on the job before her accident. But upon meeting with Bill’s wife, Amy realizes that it was Richard who killed him by accident, and then tried to cover up his potentially career-ending mistake. Richard knew that Amy was on to him before her accident, and he desperately hoped that her memories would not resurface, but he will now have to face the medical review board.
By the end of the episode, Amy tells her ex-husband Michael that they should talk, but they end up kissing for the second time in three days at the hospital — only this time, Amy’s new beau, Dr. Jake Heller (Jon-Michael Ecker), catches them in the act from afar.
Peter Stranks
Last month, in a strong vote of confidence for a show that debuted at midseason, Fox ordered a 22-episode second season of “Doc.” As she prepares to return to Toronto to shoot Season 2 this summer, Parker, who could not contain her excitement about finally being able to discuss all the spoilers, opens up about how Amy’s past and present will influence her future — and her take on the show’s central, “juicy” love triangle.
Let’s start with Amy rediscovering that Richard made a costly mistake on the job and then tried to pin the blame on her. What is going through Amy’s mind as she finally puts the pieces together?
When Amy wakes up from her accident with this retrograde amnesia, she becomes a detective in her own life, right? She is looking for the clues that are going to fill in these gaps for her, and those clues, for the most part, come from what other people tell her. There’s a few things she can find out through her emails and getting her phone back, but she’s forced to depend on other people.
What’s quite difficult for her is that she’s told over and over again what an asshole she’s been. She doesn’t remember being the person she became — who was so demanding of people, who had no compassion for the humanity of the people she was working with or the patients she had. Her one intention was to save these people’s lives. I think if one thing came out of her losing her son, it was that she wasn’t going to lose somebody else in a mistake. She’s terrified to miss something, and Richard tells her that at one point: “You were so terrified you would run tests and tests, and it was not right.” She’s blinded, at first, to what Richard’s up to, but there’s these clues and a nagging intuition that something there is not right, so she follows that intuition.
I think one of the heartbreaking things about the Richard story is that he made an honest mistake in a situation that costs someone their life. But he’s a doctor — you can’t do this work without making the odd mistake. These people are human. But he’s so afraid of the Amy that we meet at the beginning; he’s so convinced that she’s so unforgiving that he would have lost his job. I think, certainly, as the woman that she is now, Amy would’ve forgiven him. She would’ve understood. She says in the very first episode: “This is what insurance is for. This is why the hospital has it. If you made a mistake and it was an accident, just tell me.” And he cannot do it. We find out throughout the season why he can’t do it, what his character flaw is and what’s going on in his life.
So I just found that [final confrontation] scene to be absolutely heartbreaking. This is a man who has been ruined by not this one mistake, but by what he does with that mistake. It’s very similar in some ways to the road that Amy has gone down in terms of choosing the wrong path, or it feels like it’s chosen for you and you can’t escape it. She says that she could forgive the other stuff, but she can’t forgive this. She’s had to be so vulnerable now with everyone, and he has lied to her about who she is and what she’s done — and I think she can’t forgive that.
At the end of Episode 4, Michael takes Amy to the local natural history museum, where he tells her that Danny’s heart gave out on a school field trip that Michael was chaperoning in Amy’s place. That devastating final scene felt like a turning point in terms of getting these two exes to a place of reconciliation that they weren’t able to reach in the years immediately following Danny’s death.
I think Omar is so wonderful in the show, and that dynamic is so hard. Here’s a couple who really loved each other, who were really happy. It’s very, very difficult to stay in a relationship after the death of a child because the grief is so profound, and the partners are experiencing it differently. There’s also a festering resentment about how the boy died that Amy can’t let go of. This perhaps hasn’t actually been said out loud, but they both believed that, had Amy been there with the boy and not Michael, the boy might still be alive, and they cannot overcome that.
There’s something slightly abstracted about the death of her son, because it’s not immediate for anyone else in this world she’s now living in. It is for her, but not for anyone else. But the loss of Michael is right in front of her every day, and she’s lost without him. So her need by Episode 4 becomes so intense. She cannot understand why they would’ve broken up; she needs to know about this poison pill, this resentment. Michael doesn’t want to go back there, understandably. That’s the place he’s struggled really hard to come past and through, but he has to. So he takes her to the place where their son died and he explains it to her — and it’s fucking heartbreaking.
Amy has flirted with the idea of falling back into what she believes were old habits with Michael, and Michael hasn’t exactly shut her down. What’s going through her mind when Michael kisses her in the elevator at the end of Episode 9 and then in his office at the end of Episode 10?
For Amy, they’re not old habits or past life; they’re present. She has a scene where she says to him, “Do you remember when we went to Paris for my 40th birthday and we spent the whole weekend in the hotel?” We assume they spent the whole weekend in the hotel making love, being romantic. And she says, “That was two weeks ago for me.” Michael is her fundamental anchor to who she knows herself to be. He is her person, and that attachment is very, very present for her. So Amy’s longing for Michael — it’s not romance; it’s a deep love.
I think Michael’s incredibly confused. Sometimes, couples break up because they stop loving each other. I don’t think these people stopped loving each other. I think that this tragedy broke their ability to see that in each other, and Amy left him. Michael is now presented with the woman from before, the woman who loved him, the woman who could see him as who he knew himself to be to her, if that makes sense. Although [their kiss] crosses lines morally — because he’s married and has a child on the way with this other woman — I have so much empathy for them in that moment.
I think that there’s a part of Amy that’s really desperate and struggling. Even though she pulls it together in some ways — she’s going to become a doctor again, she begins this romantic relationship with Jake — her relationship to Michael is so fundamental to who she is that, in the fear of losing herself, she’s quite desperate to regain that attachment. She also has this brain injury. It’s mentioned by some people during the season who are not Richard, and who are worried about her becoming a doctor again, but impulsivity really can be an issue with certain brain injuries, so I expect that that has some part of it as well.
We have to remember that Amy is a flawed human being. She may not remember them, but she has made a number of choices that have been selfish, that have been self-preserving, that have been about her own need and desperation. I think you see it in mental illness, in addiction, in grief: When we feel really bad, it’s really hard not to be self-obsessed. So that’s where we leave them at the end of this season — Michael is who she goes to when things really are hard.
Peter Stranks
The episode ends with Jake watching Amy kiss Michael. You said earlier this season that Amy is such a mystery to herself that she’s not going to be able to know which of these men is good for her until she figures out who she is. Does Amy know what she wants at this stage? Where is her headspace right now with these men who represent different parts of her past?
We had a lot of conversations with the writers, and between the three of us. The writers knew they wanted this kiss between Michael and Amy; they knew they wanted Jake to see it. But right up until when we were doing it, it wasn’t clear how that story would be left. I was very glad to hear that they left it on what Jake sees — and what Jake thinks he sees — which is this embrace. What he sees fundamentally is that these people still love each other, that this woman that he’s in love with loves somebody else. That doesn’t mean she’s going to be with him. That doesn’t mean he’s going to leave his wife and they’re going to get together. We don’t know what that means. I don’t think Amy knows what that means.
So I think what we witness as the audience is as confusing and heartbreaking as the reality for these three characters. I think there’s a truth that Jake has been really trying to ignore because he’s in love with her. A love triangle is an element of the genre of medical procedural. What is extraordinary about this love triangle is that one of the people in it doesn’t remember that she’s in it! I love the shots of Jake in the first episode when he sees her and he recognizes that she doesn’t remember him. The woman that he was with earlier that day who he loved is gone, and the woman that Michael thought was gone is back. That’s just really juicy storytelling.
With so much space for storytelling in Season 2, what unanswered questions do you still have about Amy? What specific aspects of her life are you most excited to dig into going forward?
I personally am interested in getting a little bit deeper into the relationship with the daughter and how the daughter was changed by Amy’s grief. It’s very taboo in our culture for women to be perceived as “bad” mothers, and it’s typically not an aspect of a character that gets explored in the hero of the story. We see men all the time who are crappy fathers, and we still think they’re interesting, fabulous people. We do not do that with women. Amy really failed her daughter, and we would be remiss to just let it go, like, “I’m sorry I didn’t see you,” and now everything’s OK. I think we’re going to find that there are many more complicated layers going on there.
I think there’s something really important and interesting to explore about womanhood and aging. This is a woman who, the last time she remembers it, was 40 and now she’s almost 50. That is a huge change in a woman’s life. You are leaving the end of your fertility, and I am fascinated by women in middle age because it’s actually such a powerful part of a woman’s journey. And yet, for a long time, no one over 50 was even cast in roles like these because it was scary, I think, to people. They could sort of relate to women in childbearing years — and your sexuality was really linked to being fertile. And to be a woman of 50, to be in a relationship with a younger man, and to look in the mirror and see how one’s face has changed in that decade is a lot. There’s a lot to explore there that I am really hoping we get to dig into.
We don’t deal specifically with COVID in the show because the writers decided that was just too massive a thing, but that obviously changed healthcare. There are a lot of people who went through this intense trauma, and I think we’re going to see more of the cost of doing this work. There is a tremendous cost to the mental health and the physical health of the people who do this important work.
And then we are blessed with this black hole of Amy’s memory. It’s like Mary Poppins’ bag, you know? You can pull anything out of it!
This interview has been edited and condensed.
