Molly Parker Scrubs In for ‘Doc’

The actress Molly Parker likes the moment when it all falls apart, when a character loses everything. “Because, do you just give up on life?” she said. “Do you just die? Or do you change?”

Parker (“Deadwood,” “House of Cards”), 52, had thyroid cancer about a decade ago. She doesn’t speak about it often, and she is quick to say that she is fine now. Dying was not really on the table. But the treatment did disturb her endocrine system. The recovery took years. And it changed her, she said.

Cerebral, with an often febrile intensity, Parker is the rare actress who can run both very hot and quite cool. She seems to feel more than the average woman and to think more, too. In her 30 years in the business, she has typically gravitated toward its margins — indie films, prestige television when prestige television was new. (That said, she has made one Hallmark movie — for the money, she stressed.)

Which is to say, she was not looking to star in a network show, let alone something as blindingly normal as a medical procedural. If the role had been offered to her 10 years ago, she wouldn’t have considered it.

“I was only going to do indies for the rest of my life,” she said.

But when her agents sent her the scripts for “Doc,” a Fox series that premieres on Tuesday, she read them. Yes, it was a network show. Yes, it was a procedural. Yes, it would mean time away from her teenage son. Yet she was drawn to the story of Amy Larsen, a brilliant doctor who gets retrograde amnesia after a serious car accident. In Amy, she found another woman at a moment of crisis, another woman who would choose to survive.

In “Doc,” Parker plays a brilliant doctor who forgets a huge chunk of her life after being in a serious car accident. Credit…Fox