Maternal dealings

JUST like her character Nancy Botwin, the pot-selling mom in Showtime’s popular series “Weeds,” Mary-Louise Parker took the job because of her kid. For two decades, Parker has been one of the hardest-working actors in show business -- it was not unusual for her to do three movies a year, on top of an inevitably well-received play plus a little TV work on the side.

Then, two years ago, she had a baby and that, as any working mother will tell you, changes everything. Suddenly, life on location seemed less appealing, 14-hour days impossible. Although theater remains her passion, with a child-friendly schedule to boot, it is not the most lucrative form of acting around.

Which left television. Not that Parker has ever shied away from the electronic hearth -- she’s made several TV movies, she’s been nominated for an Emmy for her recurring role in “The West Wing” and she won one for her work in HBO’s “Angels in America.” She had never shopped around for a lead role in a series, but it didn’t take her all that long to find one. When she read Jenji Kohan’s script about an upper-middle-class Southern California suburban widow who finds herself dealing dope to make the mortgage, Parker thought it was perfect.

“The script was sick and funny and charged to create pathos and irony, which is what I’m always interested in,” Parker said recently.

As with Nancy’s cannabis-based cottage industry, the logistics worked well for a single mom. Although it shoots in L.A., “Weeds,” is a half-hour show with a 13-episode season, as opposed to the 22 usually required by the networks, so Parker and her son, William, wouldn’t have to be away from their New York home for more than a few months.

She told Showtime she was in.

Clearly, it was a good deal for all concerned. Showtime got a big enough critical and commercial bounce to put it back in the game against its more heralded archrival, HBO.

“Weeds,” which returns tonight for its second season, won several awards, including a Golden Globe for Parker, who not only has a sane schedule but also a higher profile than she’s had in a while. At an age -- 42 -- when many actresses are stuck playing ex-wives and district attorneys, Parker is sexed up and smiling down from billboards and up from Internet scrolls. Yes, she’s playing a mom, but one who makes it in the alley with a rival drug dealer.

Not that Parker personally endorses this particular sort of maternal instinct.

“People are always asking me if being a mother informs the role,” she said, “which is ridiculous. I mean, I hope not.”

She considers Nancy “pretty shallow and not all that smart, but tough.”

“I wouldn’t hang out with her,” she added. “She’s very volatile; she’s like a child reacting -- you get her at a wrong moment and she won’t think, ‘Oh, well, maybe I shouldn’t do that.’ ”

This is, of course, precisely why Parker was drawn to the show. Although she is glad the show’s success may give her some financial freedom, it is the work that inevitably informs her decisions.

“Now that I have a child, I have to make a certain amount of money so I can pay the mortgage,” she says. “But it has to be work that doesn’t offend my soul, work I can stand taking, so I can go to work and not be cranky.”

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Dark characters

Of course, part of Parker’s charm is her intrinsic crankiness. She radiates prickliness, often wearing an expression of perpetual and slightly irritated surprise, although no depth of stupidity or tragedy seems to ever really shock her. But with her alabaster skin and that vulnerable mouth, she makes cantankerousness appealing, allowing her to explore the darkness haunting a wide variety of women without losing the audience’s sympathy.

From the death-denying AIDS victim of “Boys on the Side” to the Valium-addicted Mormon married to a closeted gay man in “Angels in America” to the depression-plagued mathematical genius of Broadway’s “Proof,” Parker plays along the far borders of the human soul, her characters swinging between lunacy and loveliness. And Nancy Botwin fits very well into the oeuvre.

“Nancy is a person who is basically thinking about three minutes ahead,” Parker said. “Things like that draw me in. I like how seemingly normal she is and the extremes that are lurking just under that. She knows that things happen and it changes you. Things you can’t predict.”

For a moment, Parker stared out the French doors, at the garden outside; for a moment, it seemed, she is talking about something other than a role, talking perhaps about her own life.

“Yeah,” she said, softly. “Things you never ever expect.”

Parker is not a very public star -- she shows up on the red carpet if she has been nominated or if her appearance will in some way aid a friend, but other than that she is notoriously private. Her publicist issues a warning in advance that Parker will not talk about her child or his father, actor Billy Crudup. Parker and Crudup famously ended their seven-year relationship three months before their son’s birth, and whatever pain and accommodation such a thing demanded was kept out of the press.

Parker is seated in the downstairs family room of a house a bit off Mulholland that she has rented for the three months she is in L.A. shooting “Weeds.” Across the front door, a hand-painted sign reads Welcome! -- left over from a recent visit by one of William’s friends.

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Acting choices

Parker is somewhat surprised that “Weeds” has attracted a following -- “I really thought more people would be offended” -- and that her work has received such good notice. “I’m never happy with what I do,” she said, with a shrug. Yet while she may not admire Nancy, she feels she knows her very well.

“I have a very strong image of who she really is, who she might have been if she hadn’t gotten married,” Parker said. “I try to take her as far as I can and hope they don’t cut it.”

She laughed as she said this, a sardonic laugh because her concern is literal. Parker has a reputation for being demanding on a set -- not in an I-can-only-wash-my-hair-in-Evian way but in an I-know-my-character-and-she-would-never-say-that way. “I feel like I have to protect my character at all times, that they are going to mess with it or break it,” she said. “And they can; they can take a performance and turn it into the exact opposite of what I intended.”

On “Weeds,” she has publicly tangled with the show’s creators over the direction and intensity of her character. “I make fairly strong, big choices, and they just cut around them,” she explained. “So when I see the scene, it’s as if my choices weren’t there. And there’s nothing I can do.”

She used a scene from an upcoming episode as an example -- coming home from a late night out, Nancy is supposed to look for, and subsequently find, aspirin. As Parker spoke, her body shifted from its casual interview slouch into something much tenser, more anxious. “I came in, I felt like she was in a state of being reckless, fried, emotionally fried, so I go to the drawer -- ‘Where’s the aspirin?’ -- and start rummaging around and can’t find it, so I take the drawer,” she mimed pulling a drawer out and heaving it up, “and dump it in the sink, reach in and say,” her voice becomes falsely sweet, “ ‘Oh, here it is.’ ”

When she saw the dailies, she said, the entire drawer dumping had been cut and she was left in a head shot asking where the aspirin was and saying, “Oh, here it is.”

“I actually really had to hand it to them,” she muttered darkly. “They totally turned it into something completely different than I had played it. My hat’s off to them.” She slumps back onto the couch. “I am trying not to sound cranky, because I’m not really cranky. I don’t really have anything to bitch about. But it does get frustrating sometimes. I mean, they hire you because you make these choices and then they don’t let you make the choices.”

She sighed. “But that’s the nature of it, I guess.”

And lately, Parker admits, she has become “not entirely pleased” with the persona she seems to have developed on the set. “I am never entirely comfortable on a set,” she says. “I’ve just noticed recently that on a set, I become something not completely authentic. Harder and yet strangely more ingratiating. It’s something I’ve just begun untangling.” She pauses and struggles for a way to describe it. “Being the center of attention on the set is not ... something I relish.”

This is an impressive contradiction for an actor, especially one so deeply infatuated with live theater. “I feel much more present in a theater, on a stage, than I ever do in real life,” she said. “I don’t like people in my face. I’m super-private, even secretive. But no one has to ask me to go out there in front of hundreds of people for two hours night after night.”

Like other stars before her -- Julie Andrews, Jessica Tandy -- Parker has had roles she created in a play turned over to other actresses for the film versions. At the beginning of her career, it was “Prelude to a Kiss” (she was nominated for a Tony; Meg Ryan got the film role) and more recently “Proof” (she won the Tony; Gwyneth Paltrow made the movie).

“Was I happy about it? No. Both those plays I took from basically table readings to Broadway,” she said. “But I wouldn’t trade the experience of being in the plays for being in the movie. How could I? I did like 500 performances of ‘Proof.’ Every one a different experience. And that’s what it’s about, the experience. Otherwise, you’re just, I don’t know, drifting around, going to Williams-Sonoma.”

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Wanted: A good play

It’s hard to imagine Parker, who seems fueled by equal parts enthusiasm and exasperation, drifting anywhere. Although she says she would like to “not have to work” for a while now that there’s a new season’s worth of “Weeds” in the can, she’s filming “Small Tragedy” with Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard.

What she really wants to do next is a play, if only because she thinks it would be good for her son to “spend more time in the theater, not on these crazy movie and TV sets.” But she is having a hard time finding a play she loves.

“There aren’t any plays,” she announced, almost angrily. “I’ve read 10 plays in the last month, and I didn’t like any of them. When I got out of college, there were all these plays. Now everyone is writing screenplays.”

Meanwhile, she’s ready and willing to take Nancy Botwin as far as she can for as long as the public allows. Starring in a TV show about potheads has, after all, given her an insight into people’s relationship with drugs and the medium.

“I do have people who seem to assume that I have a much greater understanding about drugs than I do,” she said, laughing. “We have a very nice technical advisor on set, but beyond that .... This one girl came up to me, totally stoned, and gave me this hand signal that I guess I was supposed to understand. I just smiled and thought, ‘Go away.’ ”

Stranger than the admiration of passing stoners, she said, is the attitude people seem to have toward television. “No one watches it,” she said, deadpan. “Once you’re on a TV series, you realize that no one watches TV, because everyone comes up and tells you they don’t. They don’t even own TVs, and they’re really proud of this. It’s very strange. I mean I have a TV, but I don’t watch it because I am a single mother and have to get up at the crack of dawn, but I’m pretty sure plenty of people do actually watch.”