It’s a warm, bright-skied morning in Brooklyn, the last full day of the school year, and Mary-Louise Parker is … Zooming in from Romania, where she will be spending the next five weeks in a constricting hoop skirt. “I’m in Bucharest, filming a mini-series about the Underground Railroad,” the South Carolina-born Brooklynite says in her signature drawl. It’s the same lazy and mesmerizing voice that the actor can be counted on to deploy on stage, screen, or – as is the case with the bite-size project we’ve convened to discuss – on audio format. Parker has voiced numerous audiobooks, including her own, the outstanding 2015 Dear Mr You, a collection of notes to various men in her life. “It’s a weird exercise because it’s very technical,” Parker, perhaps best known as the star of Weeds, says of narration work. “Sometimes your voice gets really, really tired. I would never do an audiobook while I’m doing a play because it’s just too tiring for the voice. This came about like when I just finished a play and I liked the character so …” Parker, who has a way of speaking in ellipses, plays Beth Heller, the wise-cracking and well-to-do lawyer in Murder in Bermuda, a four-hour-long Audible original that comes from the atelier of thriller writer James Patterson. The drama was fleshed out by a handful of co-writers, and is heavy on sun-baked atmosphere and murder count. Parker plays a character whose voice is laced with cocktails and irony. Parker is a performer who is as droll and unflappably intelligent as they come, and her participation elevates the production from your typical dun-dun-dun radio drama to something worth sticking with. Parker, 58, was an early audio adopter. Her favorite podcast is Ear Hustle, the Bay Area-based show about the incarceration system. She also loves Heavyweight, and wants to know what a journalist recommends she listen to (Who? Weekly, duh). With more than a month left in Romania, Parker says she yearns for the company of her dog and her children, a 19-year-old son and 16-year-old-daughter (her son’s father is actor Billy Crudup, who memorably broke things off with her when she was seven months pregnant). Fittingly for a conversation that is ostensibly about a cliffhanger-packed production, our chat takes place in two bite-size parts (part one left the Guardian wanting more, and Parker kindly agreed to jump back on the call at the end of her block of interviews). It’s a rambling, somewhat hectic two-parter, but there is a through line: securing a place in the Hollywood firmament is not Parker’s concern. She isn’t interested in asserting that she is a Big Deal, nor in making a big deal out of being low-key, as many of her Brooklyn contemporaries loitering around school pick-up in their pre-scuffed Golden Goose sneakers seem so bent on. And she sure isn’t a snob. Murder in Bermuda is good old-fashioned entertainment, evocative of 1940s radio series, and probably not poised to rank high among the dinner-party chatter agenda items of summer 2023. Here is where we might note that Parker cut her teeth as a soap opera actor, debuting on Ryan’s Hope, before becoming a highly decorated Broadway actor. She won a Tony for her role in Proof as well as her performance as a creative writing professor with cancer in playwright Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside. She has done the prestige television thing, too, first on The West Wing and then as the star of Weeds, which ran for eight seasons. She was never as recognizable as when she was on television, she says. “Even if you do one episode of something, it’s immediate, the people’s reactions to you on the street, you just become much more visible … I always considered myself like a regional theater actress who does, like, you know, Broadway and then, like, I do, like, some movies or whatever sometimes …” The power of television was never as indisputable as when she starred in Weeds, playing widowed pot dealer Nancy Botwin. The show wasn’t expected to be such a hit, but Parker’s radiance is hard to turn away from. “Chris Rock made fun of me at the Golden Globes because nobody knew what Showtime was,” she recalls. “I just took it because I liked that part.” Now rumors are swirling about a Weeds reboot. “Every time I ask, it seems to be closer,” she says. “But because of the strike, we don’t know. And it can fall apart at any time.” She says she isn’t getting her hopes up. “It’s just … I’m so much older now. It’s like it doesn’t have the same currency, you know, for a woman of my age, so I don’t know. But I think if they actually use that, it could be interesting.” For many years, Parker hung out at her farm in upstate New York, where she made maple syrup and tended to goats. But she isn’t comfortable driving a car, and the chauffeuring duties fell to “whatever boyfriend or like babysitter or whomever”, she said. “I just … worked it out.” Now that one of her kids is out of high school, and the other has only one year to go till graduation, she has sold the farm. As charming as the simple life was, it was tricky to pull off. Her current life is centered in Brooklyn. She keeps a low profile, and takes cues from her good friend, Laura Linney. “Laura takes the subway, and it’s like Laura, you know, she went to theater school and she keeps doing theater,” Parker said. “We have a similar thing where we’re not, like, running for office in Hollywood.” Parker is currently working with Justine Bateman, a vocal opponent of Botox culture, on a narrative film based on Bateman’s anti-interventionist beauty proclivities. Is Parker in the same camp? She rolls her eyes and leans in close to the camera. Her forehead is high and beautiful, and riven with horizontal lines. “How do you express stuff?” she asks. “I’m a theatre actress. As you can see by my forehead and my eyes, I like to be able to express myself. It’s like, if I can’t move my forehead, there’s so many things you can’t convey.” Parker’s essay collection garnered critical acclaim, especially for Dear Mr Cabdriver, a piece addressed to a taxi driver who picked Parker up on a day when the actor, who’d recently been dumped by Crudup, lost her patience with another taxi driver who couldn’t find his way to her destination. It was the one entry that editors identified to be about Crudup, and it made headlines. A more rousing and beautiful essay, though, is Dear Mr Orderly, written to an employee at the hospital where her son was born. The piece encapsulates the anxiety over the impending loss of a child who, no matter how small and helpless, will undoubtedly outgrow the world of his parent. When Parker speaks with the Guardian, news of Crudup’s surprise courthouse marriage to Naomi Watts is only three days old. She seems stunned to be asked about this – we’d been talking about books, and Botox and Brooklyn. “I wish them well,” she’s quick to say, her eyes a little betrayed. “And absolutely, I honestly of course wish them every happiness because that’s my son’s father. So I’m happy for them. I’m happy they found each other –” “That was 10 minutes!” Her publicist chimes in. “Say hi to me on the street!” Parker cries out before the screen goes black. Murder in Bermuda is out now on Audible