TORONTO -- Actress Parker Posey earned the nickname Queen of the Indies with a slew of eccentric roles in smaller offbeat comedies, including "Waiting for Guffman," "Dazed and Confused" and "Best in Show."

But these days she's feeling "like a gambler" in an industry that isn't giving much financing to the types of films she usually does, she says.

So when she got a role as an unhappily married professor in writer-director Woody Allen's new film "Irrational Man," she cried.

"The career path of an actress, you have to be lucky and that's why, kind of, I burst into tears over it," Posey says in a phone interview from New York.

"I felt like I was in Vegas all of a sudden, you know? I've seen movies change over my career and fewer and fewer auteurs that can still get their movies financed.

"I have thought of other career options and have seen something go out of style and it's something that I thought would last a long time.

"I've relied on my luck and so I felt really lucky, because then I knew that it would help my career."

Out Friday in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, "Irrational Man" stars Joaquin Phoenix as a brooding philosophy professor who has everyone talking when he arrives at a small college on the East Coast. Emma Stone plays a student who is enamoured with him while Posey plays a married colleague who yearns for his attention.

The three are caught up in a love triangle that comes to a head when Phoenix's character commits an existential act that gives him a renewed vigour.

Posey says she got the role just after starring in the play "The Realistic Joneses" at Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Conn.

"I wasn't a big enough name to be cast in the Broadway production and that was indicative of these times in our culture that would naturally have me worried, especially a little play," she says.

"So it was a relief and it was an awareness that kind of overcame me" when the part in "Irrational Man" came about, she adds.

"We're at the mercy of the culture and the culture now is a lot about self-creating your own material, because agencies and studios are making bigger franchise genre films," says Posey.

"So I've been looking at other ways to change and evolve with the changing culture and coming up with other options. So you just have to stay creative."

"Irrational Man" opens July 31 in Halifax, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Victoria.