"Obviously, when you do a film, any film, you have to trust the people you are working with," Molly Parker begins to carefully, speaking of her role in the white-hot, likely-to-be-X rated new film, Center of the World.  "But the character in this film is not me - it's part of me..it's my body, and no character can really exist outside of what I create, but she definitely, unquestionably, came out of how vulnerable I felt at every moment."
    Freckle-faced, makeup-free, wearing an old sweater, and sipping a cup of tea to soothe an encroaching cold, Parker 27, has ventured out to share some of her experiences in making Wayne Wang's chancy cinematic Pas de deux.  In this twenty-first century Last Tango, Parker play a musician moonlighting as a part-time lap dancer who contracts to live out one man's fantasy (and possibly her own) over the course of three days in Las Vegas.  The sexually explicit, pornographically imagined journey pushes the protagonists, and pushed the actress herself, at times, to the brink of reality.
    "I think maybe the truest and most honest reason I decided to do Center of the World," Parker ventures, glancing upward as if for heavenly guidance, "is because I am fascinated by things that scare me.  One has to be careful not to pursue transgression.  It's not something I pursue," she reasons, "but who knows, maybe it's part of my journey."
    This is not Parker's first time at the fair, however.  Her journey to the Center took her through similarly dicey material, including an extraordinary performance in Lynne Stopkewich's 1996 Kissed, in which she play a necrophiliac whose duties at a funeral parlor include mounting the corpses of men in pagan sexual liaisons.  An unlikely launching pad for the Vancouver-reared actress - and an auspicious debut - it led to a string of first-class roles in films such as Canadian auteur Jeremy Podeswa's The Five Senses, in which she plays the shattered mother of a missing three-year-old; U.K.-native Michael Winterbottom's lyrical Wonderland, in which plays a working-class, pregnant South Londoner; and Hungarian director Istvan Szabo's epic Sunshine, in which she portrays a Hungarian Jew married to Ralph Fiennes.  It's a world-class portfolio for someone so young, which is why, Parker says, she has slowed her travels and relocated to Los Angeles's Echo Park.  "For working reasons," she stresses, glancing outside at the atypical, rain-saturated California gloom.  "I said I would never move to Los Angeles, but i got tired of travelling here so I much for work, going home to Toronto to see my boyfriend, then coming back again.  So here I am.  No more traveling for auditions."
    After all those stellar roles, Parker still needs to audition?
    "Oh no, not at all," she deadpans, taking a sip of tea before she cracks up laughing.  " I don't need to audition at all."
    The willowy actress studied ballet for 15 years, starting at age three, eventually en barre with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School.  Her parents, whom she adores, opened up a seafood store when she was around five.  " I am a fishmonger's daughter," Parker proclaims proudly.  "I know how to wield a cleaver, gut a fish..you name it.  I was very good at it.  If there is a karmic hell, mine is filled with fish and crabs."  Eventually, however, she decided to put her energy into other things, abandoning shellfish for something more cerebral, "like acting."
    What sets Parker apart, in the sparest moments, is a still, watchful quality.  Her open face is a tabula rasa of warring impulses inviting you to step inside her soul.  But fragile?  She shakes her head, a bit of steel creeping into her cushioned tone.  "I don't think so.  I really don't think that's what Wayne was drawn to."
    With Peter Sarsgaard (Boys Don't Cry) cast as her sexmate, the audacious concept of director Wang and his cowriters Paul Auster (Smoke, Lulu on the Bridge) and wife Siri Hustvedt was to make a film on video that looked like a porno.  The goal was not so much in content as in visual aesthetic, one reason they decided to shoot the film with a range of small digital cameras.
    "I think they've come up with some really intriguing images," Parker says, but as to the "method" hindering or lubricating the script's intense intimacy, she is unequivocating.  "Peter is a wonderful man, and an amazing actor, but honestly, shooting scenes that are physically revealing - sex scenes - no matter what camera you're using, are probably some of the hardest acting work you can do.  For some reason, even if I'm playing a doctor, I can believe that I'm actually performing some kind of surgery, but all the time you're acting as if having sex with someone you're aware that you're not really having sex with that person.  It can often feel fake and disconnected, especially if you're looking for some kind of feeling of connection."
    Wang's additional challenge was to set up the film's construct to echo the "narrative" structure of a pornographic film, a genre whose dramatic arc is as predictable (and slight) as a Schwarzenegger film.  "In this case, it's a threesome, then blow-job, then two girls," recites Parker saucily, by way of clarifying her erotic participation in the picture.  "Wayne was very interested in taking that formula and layering it onto real actors with real characters to embody.  Much of what occurs in the film is based in part on improvisations from our discussions on why people are so drawn into fantasy, and what makes it work.  Often the idea of what might turn you on, and actually doing that thing, is potentially different.  I don't think that's a bad thing to realize."
    More evidence of Parker's potent imagination is on display in the upcoming War Bride, playing "an angry, angry woman;" in Sweethearts of the World, arguably a labor of love as Parker executive produced the project, and her fiancé Matt Bissonnette wrote and directed along with Steven Clark; and finally, in a mid-Western reunion with Kissed director and friend Stopkewich called Suspicious River, in which she plays a small town motel receptionist who has her own definition of room service for guests willing to pay the price.
    "More sex for hire, that's right," grins Parker, who need do no further research on the topic.  "In fact, before I did Center of the World, I spoke to numerous sex workers and dancers.  Many of the women are incredibly strong and dynamic.  I met one who is a professor at Berkeley and a dominatrix."  Almost all, she relates, spoke of their profession as "empowering," aware that it is to some degree, an addiction - to power, to money, and control of others, as well as their feelings.
    "But I think in order to feel good about what you do - acting, writing, professional sex - you have to be able to justify it to yourself in some way," Parker theorizes.  "When I look back at the body of my work, the things that I have cared the most are the things that forced me to confront myself.  I guess I'm fear-hunting a bit, but believe me," she teases, "the most frightening thing about Center of the World was not stripping down, it was trying to dance on carpet wearing ten-inch stilettos.  I was sure that at any moment I was going to fall flat on my face."
    Not this time, Miss Parker.