‘Doc’: Molly Parker Teases Amy’s Reaction to Michael’s New Life, ‘Ease’ With Jake

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Doc series premiere “If at First You Don’t Succeed…”]

For Amy (Molly Parker), her entire life is turned upside down in the series premiere of Doc — and it’s not just because she’s been in a car accident. Rather, she wakes without memories of the last eight years, and a lot has changed.

As Amy learns over the course of the first episode, she and her husband Michael (Omar Metwally) are divorced and their son Danny died. What she doesn’t know is a much longer list: She’s been involved with a resident, Jake (Jon Ecker), and they said “I love you” right before her accident; her daughter Katie (Charlotte Fountain-Jardim) doesn’t live with her; she had questions about the actions of her coworker Richard (Scott Wolf), who’s replaced her as chief, regarding a patient; and Michael has remarried and is expecting a baby.

Below, Parker discusses Amy’s journey ahead, teases her reaction to Michael’s new life, and more.

Michael tells Amy during their call that even at their worst, he was always her friend. But how hard is it for them to be friends, given that in her mind she thought they were still married and happy?

Molly Parker: Yeah, it’s hard. It’s all hard. The situation that Amy and everyone in her life find themselves in is unbelievably complicated. I think after she has her accident and she loses her memory and she wakes up and she thinks it’s eight years earlier and she’s still married to Michael, from that point on, she is really dependent on other people to tell her who she is because it turns out the person she thought she is is not who she became.

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I think about her as this person who had these two moments in her life where she sort of loses everything, where her life completely falls apart. And to me, those are always the most interesting moments to investigate for an actor, but also just for good drama because those are the moments when people either need to change or they kind of give up on life. They just sort of stop. And I think the first time when she felt she lost everything, she gave up on life; I think her going back to work was sort of the best she could do to just not die. Part of that was she became tragically self-sufficient. When she wakes up from her accident and she has no memory, she’s forced to depend on other people. She is forced to speak truthful connection with these people in her life that she has not let close to her because she doesn’t know who she became. Only they know. And each one of them has their own perspective of who she became.

I think Amy is involved in a kind of mystery — on the basic medical procedural level of every week, we have a new medical mystery, she’s that kind of detective. And then she also has this greater mystery she has to unravel, which is, who am I and who did I become and is that who I want to be? All of those things are what are going to affect whether or not she and Michael ever get back together or can be friends or just what their relationship looks like. And I think that’s true for all of the people in her life.

We also learned at the end of the premiere about Michael’s new relationship and they’re expecting a baby. What can you preview about when Amy finds out and how she reacts, based on who she is now?

In so many ways, it’s just one more unbelievable thing. I think at the point where she learns that Michael — after a while, she starts to assume Michael must be in a new relationship, but she did not expect him to be having another child. I think in the premiere or in the second episode, they’re having a conversation and she says to him, do you remember when we went to you took me to Paris for my 40th birthday and blah blah blah? He says yes, and she says, that was two weeks ago for me. There are things which are so present for her that for everyone else are almost ancient history. And I think one of the things that Amy is forced to learn is how to be present because she can’t depend on — her path is much further away from her than it feels. And although she has to deal with it, it’s all new. Everything that happens from the moment of her accident on is like a news story, and then it takes her a while to realize that she is in charge of writing that story.

And then speaking of mysteries, there’s this Dixon mystery that’s been set up —

I know!

— that Amy does not remember. She told Richard he’s done if he’s lying. But what can you preview about how that’s going to play out now and how this Amy is going to be dealing with it?

What makes this so incredibly rich is the complicated character at the center of this otherwise kind of genre, medical procedural. I think it hits all those notes of love triangle and high stakes and all those things. But at the center of it is this really complicated woman in a very complicated situation, and that situation means that there are a lot of secrets that the audience will have that she doesn’t have, that other characters will have that she doesn’t have. Also there is the potential for people around who her are perhaps untrustworthy to suggest things happened in her past that maybe didn’t and she wouldn’t know the difference.

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What can you say about what Amy and Richard’s dynamic is like because of the fact that one person knows about this and the other person doesn’t?

I am so impressed with what Scott Wolf did in this show. I didn’t know him personally before, but I’ve liked him for a long time. His work in this show I think is the best work I’ve seen him do. It is against type, but also it is layered so that by the time we get — We start off thinking, oh, maybe we just don’t like this guy. But he so beautifully layers this character. And I think that is kind of what is great about the show, is that he’s not just the bad guy. She’s not just the good girl. She is all those things. She is mean sometimes and unkind and uncompromising. She also has the capacity for deep compassion and humor and all the rest of it, and kind of all of the characters do.

What we know is that her and Richard were really good friends. They were probably a lot like Jake and Sonya [Anya Banerjee] are now: contemporaries, peers coming up at the same time, sometimes competing with each other. We find out that I know his kids, I’ve known them from when they’re little. He knew my kids. We went to swimming lessons together. There’s all this incredibly rich history, and that gives us so much insight into what at the beginning just seems like she’s bad, he’s made a terrible mistake, cut to him trying to cover up because he doesn’t trust her. He essentially doesn’t trust what she would do to him if she knew the truth. He can’t be vulnerable with her anymore because of who she had become. So it’s a messy situation and kind of just really heartbreaking

Before the accident, Amy responds to Jake’s “I love you” in kind, and based on what we see there, they were happy, it seemed like a real relationship. But now Amy doesn’t have those memories. So what does that relationship look like? And it’s inevitable she finds out. 

I think there’s a bunch of stuff there. I think when we first see that reciprocity from Amy with Jake before the accident, it’s tentative. I think we understand it’s the first time those words have been said. This is a new relationship. There’s nowhere else in her life that we see her be vulnerable with anyone. For some reason, she can do that with Jake. And later, I think part of what she comes to find out about her and him, about them, is that even when she doesn’t know who he was to her in the past, she can sense it. It’s like she can sense his goodness, she can sense how at ease she is when she’s around him. There’s something, I think, just on a physical memory level, and I don’t mean just romantically, but just that she is able to be herself with him. And I think there was nowhere else in her life that she had that coming up to the accident. And even though that’s not a memory for her anymore as it is for him, by the time she finds out, it’s maybe not as big a surprise to her as it should be.

For Amy, the grief of losing her son is so fresh. But as Gina (Amirah Vann) points out, the accident gives her the chance to do things differently. But how hard is it for her to not just slip back into what she did in the past when she was grieving? Because it would be totally understandable if she did — to her, her son just died.

And about everything. I think it really is the scale of her loss after the accident. It’s so profound. She finds out that not only has her son passed away, but she’s lost her marriage. She’s lost her relationship with her daughter. She’s lost herself. She doesn’t know who she is. So I think the scale of the loss is so massive that it changes her relationship to grief. The first time around, she didn’t grieve. She kind of tried to lie down and die and then found that she wasn’t allowed to do that, so she got up and went to work.

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This time around, it doesn’t matter what somebody says to you, even a friend, there’s no right way to grieve. Grief, we don’t get to control it. It happens to us. All we can do is make ourselves available to it. I think that Amy does make herself available to that grief in a way that she hadn’t been able to before. And maybe in some ways, even though it’s new information to her, in her body, she kind of knew it. So I think there’s a lot of different dynamics.

The other thing is that everyone else has already grieved. She is no longer surrounded by other people who are also in the immediacy of that grief, but they all have had distance. And so she’s able to see life has gone on. I have survived this pain once. I can probably survive it again. But I think that this idea of having a second chance, it’s not that we get to do things over, but we get to change our perspective. None of us get to go back and do our life over, but we do have the opportunity at any time to change the way we think about our experiences, the way we understand them. And that is life changing. I think that those are the lessons that Amy is learning. It doesn’t mean she’s not going to revert to old behaviors because they were in her before. There’s some reason that she had that set of reactions to that loss in the first place.

Right now, nobody knows if she’ll get her memories back. But the more she hears about what she was like and learns about what she’s lost, does she question if she wants all of those memories back?

Oh, that’s a really good question. I hadn’t really thought about that. I think there’s things that she finds so incomprehensible that she needs information about. She doesn’t understand why her and Michael broke up. She knows, I think on a very general level, that often marriages don’t survive the loss of a child. But I think just fundamentally, she doesn’t understand that about her and Michael because she loved him, because he was her person, and that is something she needs information in order to understand. I think that there are other things that maybe she would want to leave behind, but I think putting light in some of those dark corners is part of how she changes. Her coping mechanisms the first time around were about staying in the dark, staying under the covers, staying asleep, staying at work, not shutting down, closing the shutters. And this time it’s about letting the light in and seeing what’s there.

Doc, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Fox