Parker’s Pse

“Feelings are good,” Parker Posey says, stretched out on her bed in her Chelsea apartment. “Better to have them than not.”

It’s a good thing Posey feels this way about feelings, because right now she’s having a lot of them, most of them not good. Earlier in the day she flew in from London and was detained by United States Customs for an hour and a half while they went through her luggage and uncovered undeclared items. She was in tears.

“Someone who looks like me, I guess they pull me over,” she says.

Probably they thought she looked like some sort of . . . party girl, an image that has clung to Posey throughout her brief but productive acting life. Now 28, she’s done two dozen movies, many of them bit parts for such indie directors as Hal Hartley and Richard Linklater, earning her yet another sobriquet: the Indie Queen. Her latest effort is “The House of Yes,” in which she plays a young woman who is obsessed with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and likes to reenact the assassination, among other things, with her twin brother.

“Basically what she is is someone whose world is so big that she looks at the assassination and says, ‘My feelings are just as big as hers,’ ” Posey says of her character, Jackie O. “She’s relating to an icon much like the world has with Princess Diana. Especially in America, we’ve become a society that is just relating to people who are on television. All these talk shows, people acting out their dramas. It’s all over the place.”

There’s a bit of an edge to her voice. Aside from the incident at Customs, or perhaps because of it, she seems to be suffering an overload of herself.

“Blah blah blah blah blah,” she sings, very loudly. “Me me me me me me me. More talk about me. Let me tell you about myself. It’s amazing how much people care. Celebrities are everything now.”

With “The House of Yes” and the number of films she’s done, Posey is on the verge of becoming a celebrity herself, a fact that appears to make her uncomfortable. (When it is pointed out that her autograph sells for about $40 in New York, she responds irritably, “So?”)

Certainly she doesn’t live like one. She walks down the street and buys a prepackaged sandwich, then to a deli for cigarettes, and finally to pick up mail accumulated in her absence.

Not a personal assistant in sight. Her apartment is a three-room railroad flat reached by a flight of crooked stairs. Her living room is a bed, a couple of Victorian chairs (one broken), and closets exploding with clothes. The atmosphere is overstuffed, overwrought. In a sense, it’s like a dressing room, a place where she hangs out between performances, or movies.

“She loves the whole Gypsy mentality of film shoots,” says “House” director Mark Waters. “I think that she’ll always be a show person, even if it is working at low budgets. She just loves the people.”

“Acting is not as important to me as where I get to go and the experiences I get to have,” Posey says, firing up a cigarette. “Right now I love leaving, I love traveling. I love the whole lifestyle of acting. So much happens on movies. You’re going through things and you get a script that is talking about what you’re going through. And you start looking at the actors and you start projecting.”

Is that healthy?

“You mean to say, ‘Don’t you think it would be better mentally if you had more reality in your life?’ ”

She laughs. “But that part is so much fun, the stories, the imagination, thinking of stuff to do.”

Echoes of Blanche DuBois, although Posey is not nearly as fragile or unhinged as Tennessee Williams’ tragic heroine. Of course, unlike Blanche, she has a socially acceptable outlet for her energies. She does come from the South, however, in this case Laurel, Miss.

“Either you want to escape the South or you’re happy being there,” Posey says, leaving little doubt about which camp she’s in. “People get married when they’re 20. There’s no thought of going, like, ‘I can always do something,’ especially women. You get married and have kids.

“At least I know I’m weird and I see it,” she continues. “But I think compared to them I’m normal.”

*

Posey went to the State University of New York at Purchase and studied drama, then landed a role on the daytime soap “As the World Turns.” After a year of that, she embarked on her independent career as the nasty upperclassman in Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused.” Then came “Flirt,” “The Doom Generation,” “Sleep With Me,” “Party Girl,” “The Daytrippers,” “Suburbia,” “Waiting for Guffman,” “Basquiat,” “Drunks,” “The Clockwatchers.” . . .

Earlier last summer she was in London filming “The Misadventures of Margaret” and then returned to England in September for a role in “What Rats Won’t Do.”

The obvious question now is will Posey continue to do half a dozen independent movies a year for no money and an annual visit to Sundance (last year she received a special prize there for “The House of Yes”), or will she turn to Hollywood and its rewards? Waters isn’t sure her acting style is what Hollywood is looking for or accustomed to seeing. He compares her to old film stars, “emotionally grounded yet knowing that they’re acting, knowing that it’s slightly stylized and slightly heightened behavior.”

“Certainly most young actresses today tend to be more mired in that kind of Method naturalism, and Parker isn’t that at all,” Waters says. “She’s not big in Hollywood because they don’t conceive female parts like that. Most of the time the girl part is like the wife in ‘Con Air’ who has the kids at home and weeps a lot. I don’t think Parker could ever do the Sandra Bullock thing, the all-American girl. Especially when she does bigger-budget projects, I think she’ll probably end up being more like a character actress. Hopefully she will be able to play leads in more interesting independent films.”

It’s not as if Posey hasn’t gone up for roles in big-budget films. She has, but so far no one has seen fit to cast her. It’s been said in the press that she “scares” Hollywood. What does she suppose that means?

“I’m just honest,” she says. “I talk about it [the part], what I like about it, what I would like to do with it. I think that’s seen as too much, and if it’s too much it might be uncontrollable, and if you’re uncontrollable then you’re scary. Not that I care, because I’m working and I have a great life.

“ ‘When is Hollywood going to call?’ ” she says, sobbing melodramatically, wrist at her forehead. “ ‘Why don’t they understand me? What can I wear that they would understand me?’ I gave up that game a long time ago.”

She’s not giving it up altogether. She’s got a development deal at DreamWorks for a TV show “like ‘The Prisoner,’ ” she says. “That’s kind of weird, like reality is.”

Suddenly, the phone rings. A limousine is downstairs waiting to take her to a photo shoot. Posey pinches the skin between her eyes as if she has an ice cream headache. Wearily, she goes to the kitchen and forages for a set of keys.

“I was looking for these,” she says, finding them.

What makes these keys so special? Attached to them is a tiny music box that plays “The Sound of Music.” It makes her happy.