A walk in the Parker: Parker Posey's most memorable roles

“Air Raid! Air Raid!” As an independent film actress in the mid-'90s, Parker Posey was contractually obligated to be in the cast of "Dazed and Confused." She played Darla, the abusive leader of the senior girls hazing the freshmen, screaming at them to “fry like bacon" and dousing them with ketchup and mustard. Why can't we be friends? Because she's really mean!

In all three editions of Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" (include "More" and "Further" tales), Posey appears as Connie Bradshaw, the high school friend of the protagonist, Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney). Posey gives important advice about navigating San Francisco in the '70s, telling her to "try not looking like Tricia Nixon reviewing the troops" when trying to meet people.

"Sleep With Me" is made up of six episodes written by six different screenwriters about a married couple and their friend, who is in love with the wife. Posey plays Athena, a friend of the couple, who crashes an all-male poker game by singing songs with Joey Lauren Adams, betting out of turn and ruining the poor men's safe space. Later Eric Stolz, the married guy she almost sleeps with — while his wife is sleeping with his best friend — says she's messed up, but she corrects him. "I'm not f---ed up. I'm 24 and I don't give a s---." She also smokes a cigarette topless while the movie's theme song plays. So while she isn't the top-billed star, she easily does the coolest stuff in the movie.

Posey stars as the titular "Party Girl," a young woman named Mary who spends most of her time attending or throwing parties, wearing amazing outfits and listening to club music. But it turns out thatt her true calling is as a librarian, and she even uses library science techniques to improve her friends' lives. "Party Girl"was the first full-length feature film to debut on the internet. It also spawned a TV spinoff that failed, because it didn't star Parker Posey.

The only thing Parker Posey likes more than playing characters with ridiculous names is getting in on the ground floor with indie auteurs. She gets to do both in Noah Baumbach's debut film, "Kicking and Screaming" (not to be confused with Will Ferrell's soccer dad comedy), where she plays a girl named "Miami." Her best scene comes when she confesses to infidelity by writing "I CHEATED ON YOU" on a notebook with a Sharpie — but pauses to add a sad smiley face. She got in on the ground floor of emojis, too.

In her first movie as part of the Christopher Guest ensemble, Posey plays Dairy Queen employee Libby Mae Brown, who dreams of someday creating a "healthy, non-fat, low-fat, healthy Blizzard." It's such a heartfelt performance and proof that you have to have real theater chops to do theater this endearingly poorly. After this, Libby Mae will always have a place at the Dairy Queen, and Posey will always have a place in Guest's movies. Plus, she's delightfully reunited with Corky St. Clair in "Mascots," where he plays her character Cindi Babineaux's "mascot coach."

In "Clockwatchers", Posey plays the most intense receptionist in a pool of office workers. She's incorrectly suspected as a thief then abandoned when she goes on a one-day strike, and the other workers hang her out to dry. It's like a dark version of "Office Space," without the happy ending or ironic Geto Boys soundtrack.

In this film adaptation of Wendy MacLeod's stage play, Posey is "Jackie-O," a woman with borderline personality disorder who’s obsessed with Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis and emulates her in hairstyle and dress. When her twin brother brings home his fiancee, Jackie-O starts to fall apart, and not just because the fiancee is played by Tori Spelling. The movie gets very weird and very dark, especially when the twins play their favorite game: a re-enactment of the JFK assassination.

Is it believable that Parker Posey would have been corporatist bookseller Tom Hanks’ girlfriend? It’s more believable than Dave Chappelle being his best friend. Even though she doesn't end up with Hanks, she does get the best lines, like when Hanks has driven Meg Ryan's store out of business: "You know, I love how you've totally forgotten that you've had any role in her current situation. It's so obtuse. So insensitive. Reminds me of someone. Who? Who does it remind me of? Me!"  As Posey herself explains about her career in general, “I’m the girl who has to be annoying so the guy can go to the other girl.”

Posey plays Meg Swan, one half of a neurotic yuppie couple who makes their dog run on a treadmill and takes it to therapy. She met her husband Hamilton at Starbucks — different Starbucks across the street from each other. While she’s great in all her scenes with Michael Hitchcock, Posey’s true journey involves her dog’s constant companion, the Busy Bee. The misplaced stuffed Busy Bee sends Posey into a rampage and eventually into lecturing a pet store employee, “I didn’t ask for your opinion. I asked for a toy that YOU DON’T HAVE!”

Posey does a guest voice as Becky, a young woman who moves in with the Simpsons after her wedding with Otto the bus driver is called off. (After an ultimatum, he chooses heavy metal over her.) In a series of misunderstandings, Marge is convinced Becky is trying to replace her in the family — Homer accidentally drains her brake fluid, and Becky gives Homer mouth-to-mouth when he overdoes on ice cream. It turns out Becky did want to kill and replace Marge but gave up when she "couldn't find a shovel." Producers must have liked her voice work because she was also hired to do an episode of "Futurama."

Parker Posey gives one of the best comedic performances you'll ever see in a gory slasher film in "Scream 3." She plays an actress portraying Courtney Cox's character, Gale Weathers, in the film-within-a-film, "Stab 3," and she eventually starts following her around to get inside her head. And in case the killer who's stalking her actually wants to kill the real Gale, well, she'll be close by. Somehow, she's the emotional heart of the film. Posey got an MTV award nomination for Best Comedic Performance but was ROBBED when the MTV academy (it's just Kurt Loder and Martha Quinn) gave the Moon Man to Adam Sandler instead.

One of the most slept-on, insane, secretly subversive comedies of the new century is "Josie and the Pussycats," where Posey plays an evil record company executive using pop music to send subliminal messages to teenagers. The plot involves murdered boy bands, government conspiracies, secret albinos and evil Carson Daly impersonators, and honestly we’re leaving a lot out. Posey is madcap and over-the-top, and yet manically vulnerable at the movie's (insane) climax.

In a made-for-TV movie, Posey plays Jinger Heath, the owner of BeautiControl, an archrival of Mary Kay Ash (Shirley MacLaine) of cosmetics and multilevel marketing fame. The movie has the visuals of a Doris Day movie but the structure of "Citizen Kane" and scenery-chewing, campy performances from MacLaine and Posey, who got a Golden Globe nomination.

In her third collaboration with Christopher Guest and Crew, Posey plays pigtailed former juvenile delinquent Sissy Knox of the New Main Street Singers, the daughter of one of the Original Main Street Singers. Sissy is relentlessly enthusiastic, claiming she wants to be a "vessel of love" for the audience, and the joy is unmistakable when she and Jane Lynch duet on "Potato's In The Paddy Wagon." 

"Blade: Trinity," the third movie in the "Blade" series, feels like its cast was selected by throwing darts at a wall of random head shots. They are Kris Kristofferson, Ryan Reynolds, Patton Oswalt, Natasha Lyonne, Eric Bogosian, and of course, Parker Posey, who essentially plays the CEO of Vampire Nation, which revives Dracula. (They call him "Drake," like he's going to form an undead boy band.) Mainly, Posey trades insults and slaps with Reynolds, giving 110 percent in a movie that got 25 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. And that's a generous score. But as was learned from "Scream 3," if you want to juice up the third movie in a trilogy, add Parker Posey to the cast.

Bryan Singer’s "Superman" movie features Posey as Kitty Kowalski, the girlfriend of Lex Luthor, played by real-life villain Kevin Spacey. It’s a very throwback, almost screwball comedy relationship – until Luthor decides to murder Superman and ruin the world to own more oceanfront real estate. Posey's main role is to distract Superman so she can steal a sample of Kryptonite – and every scene she's in.

"Fay Grim" first shows up in Hal Hartley's "Henry Fool" and also returns in "Ned Rifle." In her first appearance, she's seduced by roguish novelist Henry Fool, whose influence turns her garbage man brother into a Nobel Prize-winning poet. In "Fay Grim," she gets caught up in an international plot when CIA agent Jeff Goldblum demands her help, and not to spoil anything, but she's serving a life sentence in "Ned Rifle." These plots don't make linear sense, but the movies look cool — nearly every shot in "Fay Grim" is a dutch angle (except for the two where they forgot to tilt the camera), and Posey's characterization is delightful, particularly in her scenes with Goldblum.

Posey got an Independent Spirit Award nomination for her star turn in "Broken English," written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes and featuring Cassavetes' real-life mom, Gena Rowlands, Posey's mother. It's a wonderfully real portrayal of a woman who is as good at her hotel concierge job as she is bad at romance. And even if the romance plot separates Posey and her hot French lover for no good reason, at least it sends them to Paris!

In Amy Sherman-Palladino's first TV show, post-"Gilmore Girls," Posey starred as a woman who reunites with her sister (Lauren Ambrose) when she asks her to be a surrogate mother for her child. And they bond when Ambrose learns Posey created a book series based on her childhood imaginary friend, Jezebel James. The show was canceled after just three episodes aired, but it may have been ahead of its time. If it came out a few years later, it probably would have been an hour long and on a streaming service, rather than on an impatient Fox network. Look, the title's no more awkward than "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel."

"Personal Velocity" was adapted by writer-director Rebecca Miller from her own book and earned Posey award nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle. This Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner consists of separate stories about three different women (Kyra Sedgwick and Fairuza Balk are the other two) facing a personal crossroads. Posey brings her typical energy and humor to her part as a cookbook editor in a boring relationship with a New Yorker fact checker, who gets tempted to stray by a charismatic novelist, which is an extremely Parker Posey role and dilemma.

In the Season 3 episode "Eagleton," Posey reunites with her "Spring Breakdown"  co-star Amy Poehler, playing Eagleton's parks and rec director Lindsay Carlisle Shay. She builds a fence to divide Pawnee and Eagleton's shared park, and eventually she and Leslie have a garbage fight. Everyone learns a lesson, but the real lesson: When Parker Posey is a big fan of your show, don't wait until Season 3 to invite her to guest star.

Posey plays a bookstore owner, one of her many roles related to the publishing industry — editors, authors, librarians, she's done it all. The character initially feels like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl from a romantic comedy, but as the story goes on, she reveals a much darker and sadder inner life. It’s clear Posey understood her character and Louie C.K. very well, because in an interview with Salon, she said “Louie’s a creep!"

In "Drunk History's" "Inventors" episode, Posey plays Mary Phelps Jacob, the inventor of the bra, as narrated by "Drunk History" legend Paget Brewster. Posey gives, as always, a warm and endearing performance as Jacob, standing in contrast to the drunk Brewster, who appears to be telling the story as angrily as possible to avoid cracking up.

Posey's first regular series role is on the Netflix reboot of "Lost in Space," where she takes over the role of the Robinson family's tormenter, Dr. Smith. And she literally takes over the role; her character is actually a sociopathic con artist named June Harris who steals the identity of the real Dr. Smith when alien robots attack. Posey is right on the edge of campy, as she gaslights the other characters and schemes against them. But the performance works because her villainy is kind of incompetent, which keeps her from becoming too daunting a nemesis on a (hopefully) long-running series.