Doc’s Molly Parker on medical drama and new perspectives after trauma

Canadian actor Molly Parker has a newfound respect for Noah Wyle.

Parker is the star of Doc, a drama series about a doctor who loses eight years of her memories after a car accident. For the first season, Parker researched what she could about amnesia, but for the show’s second series, she’s keen to focus on another aspect of the character, the doctor part.

“That stuff is really hard,” she told The Nightly. “There’s the language but there’s also the action, there are the procedures. Even though we’re not in an ER room, often we’re doing these procedures and talking about them where the stakes are really high and the pace is really quick.

“That’s so difficult. It’s given me an entirely new respect for your Noah Wyles, and just the people who’ve done these classic medical procedurals, and I am definitely going to spend more time (on it).

“Doctors and professionals go to school for decades, it’s not something you can learn (quickly).”

Parker, known for her roles on Deadwood and House of Cards, needs to be convincing as Amy Larsen, an internal medicine doctor who is brilliant at diagnosis and treatment. Amy knows more than anyone else and sees connections others don’t.

But her bedside manner wins fewer fans — patients find her brusque and colleagues complain about her attitude.

Waking up with amnesia after a crash sounds like a soap opera twist but Doc treats it with gravity, and the jumping off point to explore weightier themes such as regret and just who you are if you don’t remember what you’ve done.

Losing eight years of her memories takes Amy back to a time before another momentous tragedy hardened her. She has strained relationships with people in her life, including her daughter, but no understanding of how she got there.

“It’s existential in the sense that it’s not a trauma of losing your physicality but of losing your mind and your sense of identity,” Parker explained. “That’s one of the themes our show cares about exploring, which is really how much who we think we are is tied up in our memory.”

It also forces the character to confront this challenge in an out-of-character way. The first time she faced a great loss, Amy threw herself into her work and shut herself off to the people in her life. But with a brain injury and a hospital board that reluctantly allows her to practice under strict conditions, she can’t do that again.

“She’s really forced by the nature of this amnesia to become vulnerable,” Parker added. “She’s completely dependent on the people around her to tell her who she is, who she became and what she did.

“That makes her vulnerable to people, and every one of her relationships has a different idea of who she was to them. She’s in a position where she has to accept all of those opinions about her.”

Doc is based on an Italian series called Doc – Nelle tue mani and in the transformation process, the lead character was gender-flipped, which is an interesting comparison point. A powerful, uncompromising woman (Amy is the chief of internal medicine before the accident) with a difficult relationship with her child is judged differently to a man.

“That’s a very different dynamic in terms of how people think about fathers and their daughters. There’s a lot of forgiveness given to dads who aren’t around,” Parker said.

For Amy, it’s not exactly a do-over. The consequences of her life over the past eight years can’t be unwound, but there is a reckoning. It gives her a chance to stand outside of her life and assess if this is where she wanted to be, and if her relationships are what they should be.

It’s something Parker can relate to. She’s certainly never had amnesia but she knows what it’s like to be confronted with your mortality after she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer a decade ago.

“I have had some experiences in my life that I was able to bring to her and to the show,” she said. “I’m a cancer survivor. That changes your perspective.

“I am fine. I had a really slow growth and I’m so lucky, I’m fine and I will be fine, but it changes the way you think about yourself, the world, what we’re doing here, what you want to be doing here, how you want to spend your time, all these things.”

That really hits home for the character when she discovers that in the eight years she can’t remember, she suffered a huge personal loss. Grief is a part of the show but it’s also a part of life, even when it’s contending with time passing.

“My son’s about to go to college and I remember even when he was 13, feeling heartbroken that he wasn’t my little guy anymore,” Parker explained. “He was this teenage person who I had to try to forge a new relationship with.

“That’s life, it keeps changing and if we can keep open to that and not try to control it too much, which is where Amy was at, we can appreciate it, because it sure goes fast.”

Doc is streaming on 7plus