Carrie Coon is done with small talk. “I tend to go right for the jugular,” she grins. The time for conversations about the weather and I like your shoes has passed – now, she says, is a time for talk that is large and unwieldy and circles the question she finds herself asking people a lot which is (she leans in): “What are you afraid of?”
She’s at home in New York, in front of a grey screen set up to shoot her nanny’s audition tapes. Her nanny acts, her husband (Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts) acts, their little kids, well, act up – this is a house of love and drama, in which Coon mothers and frets and contemplates the end of the world. She grew up in Ohio, one of five kids – her parents adopted her sister, Morena, when Coon was three. Her father had almost become a Catholic priest before returning to run an auto parts store and her mother was a nurse who worked nights, so Coon babysat her brothers, did the laundry, played football, excelled. In 2010, she was cast in a Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf that transferred to Broadway. Though not usually a story associated with happy marriages, it was here she met Letts, 15 years her senior, and in 2013, following his emergency gallbladder surgery, they got married in an Illinois hospital. “Tracy’s hospital gown was off his shoulder. He was so high. My family kept saying the only way to get him to marry me was to drug him.” She chuckles. “It was a great wedding. The vows really put life and death just square in their middle.”
At 44, following pivotal roles in prestige TV dramas, including The Leftovers, The Gilded Age and Fargo, plus films like Azazel Jacobs’s His Three Daughters, The Nest with Jude Law, and blockbusters including the Avengers and Ghostbusters franchises, she’s currently starring in The White Lotus. And yet, she admits happily, most people have no idea who she is.
“There is a precision in her that does not feel robotic,” Jacobs tells me, “but as a person on a real quest.” The women she plays often appear ordinary and competent, their cool beauty only occasionally cracking to reveal somebody tiptoeing right up to the edge of sanity. “There’s no vanity,” Law says over email. “There’s a joy and a thrill to the challenge in the moment, and a playfulness which makes it light and fun, even if the subject matter is hard and dark.” In a recent interview for Town & Country magazine, director David Fincher (who gave Coon her first feature film role in Gone Girl) said: “It’s not that you remember Carrie Coon, but that you remember Carrie Coon was fucking great.”
Memes abound of Coon’s White Lotus character, Laurie, one of a trio of old blonde friends on a girls trip to Thailand, laundering their bitchiness through tight compliments and loudly slurping their drinks. It has ignited conversations about friendship, rivalry and a deeply feminine brand of toxic positivity. “One of the things all of my projects seem to be reinforcing this year – and I do find that the universe puts projects in your way when you have something to examine – is how, as we age, friendship is very difficult to maintain.” The show asks, she says, “not only ‘Are new friends better than old friends?’, but also the question of, ‘Are you willing to see past your ideas about a person to see the person who’s right in front of you?’”
She can do that with her children, sometimes with her friends, but finds it trickier with her siblings. “I think that it would be probably wise for me, as an adult, to remember to always re-encounter someone and try to see them for where they are.”
Her sister’s adoption was a long and expensive process, and while Coon was excited to have a sister, a four-year-old who had been selling sweets on the streets of El Salvador, the transition was complicated, and little psychological support was offered. In adulthood, “My sister was in the navy, she’s a veteran now – she has some mental health issues, and she’s in a system which is very overextended, and will be more so because of the cuts being made.” JD Vance is from Coon’s state, a fact that sharpens her response to him: “A completely unprincipled and power-hungry sell-out.” She pauses to elaborate, with precision: “They’re fascists.” In a very white town, growing up with a Latin American sister, an immigrant, “shaped all of my siblings as much as we shaped her”. It made Coon a more open-minded person and helped her become, she says, an artist. “I was a middle child and always really aware of how everyone was feeling. I was very sensitive about Morena and how she was moving through the world.” She became the go-between when her sister and mother fought, “and so that kind of adaptability, I think, lends itself well to being an actor. There’s a shape-shifting quality that comes naturally. Plus, I’m a good listener, and that’s definitely part of being an artist, or this kind of artist that I am.”
Wait, let’s just talk quickly about Coon’s voice. This is a voice that is low and serious, and sounds like it comes not just from deep within her body but perhaps deep within the earth. Says Jacobs: “I witnessed something our first day of shooting I’m still trying to get my head around.” They shot His Three Daughters in script order, beginning with a monologue from Coon to camera, a long, unbroken take. “I saw an energy or spirit spill from her, spread to the other actors facing her, past the camera and, as I turned my head, I watched it hit each surrounding crew person, one after the other. People’s spines straightened. The overwhelming feeling was: this was real, what we are doing could matter, that we all needed to do our best to reach what Carrie had begun.”
When did Coon find her voice? She worked hard on it, she says, first at graduate school, then at the experimental Roy Hart Theatre, where they told her humans can make any sound an animal can make. “You do all this wild creature work!” she says. It’s a subject that energises her, she waves around a glass of green juice. “In young people, you hear that vocal fry,” her voice thins and rises as if Paris Hilton has entered the room, “and what’s happening is people are cut off from their bodies.” Did I know, she asks, “babies can cry all night and not lose their voices, people who are dying can scream and not lose their voices. And yet our voices feel very fragile and precious when we have to use them in performance.” It’s important to really breathe, she says. “I’ve modelled that for my kids, so now I have really loud kids. But I wanted them to be able to feel their capacity, because it’s really liberating. And for women, in particular, that is power – to be in a room, to take up space.” Can she share a voice exercise with me? She straightens in her chair. “OK”.
Together we put our hands on to our chests, and open our mouths very wide and round, and say, almost sing, Oh – My – Soul. “Feel it,” she says, serious now. “Shake your chest.” I’m not quite changed, but I am sitting taller.
Coon first found her voice in her Leftovers character Nora Durst, a woman enduring the loss of her family. “She was so unapologetic, which frankly, I’m still working on, so it taught me how to drop my voice into my body and have really fast emotional access.” Both in her work, and her life. A corner of the internet got excited recently, when on a podcast Coon described her marriage as open. In fact what she said (she clarifies, wearily) was, they were “open-minded” about monogamy. Less scandalous perhaps, but just as interesting.
“If you are willing to talk to your partner about these very natural biological impulses, willing to have those conversations without feeling that your ego is threatened, everything changes.” What happens? “What’s on the other side of that is the fact that those opportunities and impulses often lose their charge entirely. Freedom is actually the most titillating and interesting offering there is to me.” It’s foolish not to acknowledge that our bodies are operating somewhere with an engine that’s not always conscious, she says lightly. “And I find that willingness just thrilling and arguably it makes my marriage much more stable.” The internet will be disappointed, I sigh, with this clarity about one of theatre’s premier power couples. “Join us for movie night, hey, who knows? I’ve always maintained I would love to have a second wife.”
To shoot White Lotus she moved to Thailand, away from her family, for six months. But, “when you get to step away from your life as a mother you get to appreciate it in a new way”. With every sunset swim, every leisurely meal, she was aware of the gift she was being given. “I got to just be the artist in the ivory tower, the thing men have done for centuries. Because of motherhood, women’s creative lives are often lived in fits and spurts. We are always being interrupted.” She discovered that, “having children feels like a deeply creative act that actually deepens my well of creativity. The act of producing a child – the depth of that is something that no male artist will ever really sufficiently have access to. So it is profoundly creative in that way.” But the “juggle” means she is regularly giving up opportunities in order to be with her kids, and compromising share space with Letts’s career.
“My husband’s almost 60, entering this third act of his life and the kind of artist he wants to be. So I have to be compassionate about whatever that transformation will be.” How does that work within the relationship? Well, she says, “Tracy and I both are in recovery. He’s been sober for over 30 years, I’m now coming up on five, and the shared language is really helpful.” During the pandemic, when their eldest child was three, Letts would write, but Coon had little structure to her day. “It was wonderful to spend all that time with my son, and also very easy to have a glass of wine at three and then maybe the next day at 12…” She chose sobriety when she recognised this “inclination” that ran in her family, and while she’d never been interested in drugs and alcohol growing up, “I did go through some pathological lying, some compulsive skin picking. I had my own version of how I was not dealing with my feelings.”
It was something she’d investigated at university, when a therapist helped her see that her skin picking was an “authenticity alarm”. “When you’re a kid, those impulse-control things are about self-soothing. We all have them. They’re just varying degrees of damage.” Eventually, she was able to confront why she was self-soothing. “And so I found that when my skin picking was really out of control, it was because I was either not living according to my values, or I was living my life in relationship to another person, having remade myself in the image that I thought they wanted from me. It wasn’t until I found myself in my own life, that that started to subside.” When was that? She winces bashfully. “When I met Tracy. I realised I hadn’t really trusted anyone before. I had been taught that I had to control information to protect other people, when in fact what I was doing was protecting my own ego. And I had to start to unpack that problem.” She could see that Letts could handle whatever she threw at him. “There was nothing I could say to Tracy that would make him mistake my behaviour for my morality. He saw me. He respected me as an artist and he respected me as a person. And he recognised in me a great potential, I think, to live a good life.” It was, she smiles, “satisfying”.
Part of getting older, she says, is about the integration of self – as we understand all our different impulses and experiences they come together, and as an actor you can bring that knowledge to the work. “That’s why it was previously unfortunate that women were pushed out of the industry when they got to 40, because we were still in the process of that illuminating feedback loop that was just creating more energy and creativity and self-awareness, which would mean we had more to give as artists just when we were being cut out of the whole game!”
Is that not the case any more? “Well, I think it’s shifting.” She reels off actors like Jean Smart and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Plus, “Women are often now the breadwinners in their homes, we are consuming art and art should be made for us!” The White Lotus always features a clutch of older women, including, in this series, Coon’s group of wealthy friends, “who are forging connections by criticising the person who’s not there. And each one feels left out. This epidemic of loneliness is about feeling fundamentally left out and like you don’t know how to conduct yourself in order to belong. It’s always about not being, I think, totally honest about our feelings.” Why is that honesty so tricky? “Mostly it’s fear – fear of being judged, fear of being misunderstood, fear of being excommunicated. It’s always fear.”
So, what is she afraid of? “I think about death a lot. Our complete denial of the climate catastrophe we’re in the middle of right now and what the implications are for our children. I don’t know how to prepare them for the world they will be living in, or dying in. The time for mitigation is over. We’ve blown past it. And now we’re facing either adaptation or suffering.” She’s travelled a long way from the Catholicism she was brought up with, and she’s unclear quite how to prepare her children for, “What comes to all of us, which is that everything you love will die and pass away. But I do feel like that’s part of my responsibility as a parent.”
She’s preparing for uncomfortable conversations. She’ll tell them she insulated their house. She got heat pumps. “But we’re actually pacified by being preoccupied with our phones. It’s keeping us all exactly where they want us. We don’t have a way to fundamentally agree on the truth. Republicans are trying to take away education of history, so people have even less context for this information. And they’re then therefore really easily manipulated. It’s terrifying.” This is what scares her.
We’ve gone over our allotted hour, of course, and Coon apologises (“You can imagine what fun I am at parties”), but we can’t just leave it there, the world smouldering, the self destroyed, phones eating our memories, so we reach for some small talk. In her deep, liquid voice she offers, “I like your scarf,” and suddenly, everything’s fine.
The White Lotus, season three, is on SKY Atlantic and NOW
Stylist Alicia Lombardini; photograher’s assistant Hele Ho; stylist’s assistant Cyrenae Tademy at Chanelncrocs and Kayla Stephenson; set design by Shari Anlauf at Atelier Management; hair by Ben Skervin at Walter Schupfer Management using Color Wow; makeup by Rebecca Restrepo at Walter Schupfer Management; nails by Marie Barokas using Zoya; shot at Pier59 Studios
