Safe to say, after recent star turns in “The Gilded Age” and the monologue of the year about friendship in “The White Lotus,” Carrie Coon is having a moment.
I asked her, “Would you agree with me that where you used to say you’re at the bottom of the A-List …”
“I think I used to say, ‘The bottom of the B-List,’ but yeah,” she corrected.
“But don’t we need to revise our assessment as where you are?”
“Maybe,” said Coon. “But the thing that’s changed for me is that I was on ‘The White Lotus,’ and now I can be in a Broadway play. That wasn’t true for me five years ago.”
The play is “Bug,” which opened just this past week. Coon is leveraging her newfound star power to play the demanding, harrowing lead role in this examination of paranoia, conspiracy, and loneliness. And she is adamant that her success should not obscure a larger, sadder reality of the theater these days: “We live in a country that is fundamentally unsupportive of the arts. So now, in order to do a play on Broadway, you have to do ‘The White Lotus,’ or else you’re not allowed. They have to replace you with somebody more famous.”
“Hang on, if you hadn’t done ‘White Lotus’ and ‘Gilded Age’ and hadn’t sort of blown up as a star …”
“Yeah. We wouldn’t be sitting here, absolutely not,” Coon said.
“Your acting ability, what you do on stage, not enough?” I asked.
“No, that’s not how we make those decisions anymore,” she said. “And you can ask all these extraordinary theater actors who don’t do plays anymore because celebrities are doing plays. It’s just a different world that we’re living in now.”
Tracy Letts is the playwright of “Bug.” He’s in love with Coon’s fearlessness. “She has ice water in her veins,” he said. “In another life, she’d make a great assassin.”
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He’s in love with her acting chops. “She’s a great stage actress,” he said. “For the people who’ve only seen her do ‘Gilded Age’ or ‘White Lotus,’ they just don’t know what a stage animal she is.”
Letts is in love with her. He and Coon have been married for the last dozen years.
I asked, “Your partners, your life partners, they had to be theatre people, right? Because it’s such a consuming world?”
“I came to that conclusion a long time ago that, whoever my partner was had to be in the profession; civilians just don’t get it,” Letts laughed. “They just don’t get it. It’s a hard life.”
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A couple of Midwesterners (Coon is from Ohio, Letts from Oklahoma), they met in 2010 doing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Letts said, “We had a palpable attraction to each other. We just wanted to be with each other.”
Coon said, “When we confessed to our director and our castmates that we were officially together, they were like, ‘Yeah. Of course.’ We thought it was shocking, this shocking revel – [and they’re] like, ‘Yeah, hello! We’ve been here the whole time.'”
When the show got to Broadway in 2013, Letts won a best actor Tony. That’s some impressive artistic range, considering his Pulitzer Prize for writing the play “August: Osage County” in 2008, and his steady presence in film and TV for the last several decades, from “Seinfeld” and “The Big Short” to “A House of Dynamite.”
He’s been around a while. Coon noted, “Tracy’s entering into sort of this …”
“Oldness?” Letts offered.
Letts is now 60; Coon is 44.
“He always gave me room to grow, because I was not in the same place in my life as him,” Coon said. “Like, what you’re sitting in contemplation of at this stage in your life is different than where I am in mine.”
So, how does that meld? “Oh, a lotta jokes,” said Coon. “Like, ‘Your second husband’s gonna love this couch.'”
Whether playwright and actor, or husband and wife, what makes this partnership work, they told us, is honest feedback and mutual respect. Letts said, “She knows I’m gonna tell her the truth. She’ll put on a dress and say, ‘How does this look?’ And I’ll say, ‘It doesn’t look good.'”
“No, no, no, no….” I said.
“It’s true!” Letts reiterated. “And she appreciates it, because she knows I’m not lying to her.”
“Isn’t rule number one of husbanding, Not bad? Which we all know means… “
“No. We don’t do that,” Letts said. “So when she puts on something and I go, ‘You look fantastic,’ or when she’s in this play and I say, ‘My God, you’re a great actress,’ she knows I’m not bulls****ing her.”
Later, I asked Coon, “If you have something to say, whether it’s praise or criticism, you know it’s the truth?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Even with things I wear.”
Letts smiled. “See?!”
While any couple might recognize that trust required to navigate life’s challenges, Letts and Coon’s “moment” is providing some uncommon tests. Take Coon landing the “White Lotus” role: “I turned to Tracy and I said, ‘There’s no way I can go away to Thailand for six months.’ We had a three-year-old and a six-year-old. And Tracy was the one who turned to me and he said, ‘We’re gonna figure this out.’
“Tracy was doing every morning. He was doing dinner and bedtime every night, and bath time by himself. So that was a really hard six months.”
“I wasn’t doing anything extraordinary; I was taking care of the kids while she was gone doing a job,” he said.
“We know when the undeniable thing comes along, and we’ll both make room for that to happen,” Coon said.
Which is why this chance to collaborate on Broadway is so important for them. The best way to handle a whirlwind is to find a place to anchor. For these two, that’s always been the theater.
“This is where we’re most comfortable,” Letts said, “in a rehearsal room preparing this on a stage, doing this in a theater. This is what we know. You just have a sense of accomplishment and gratification in the theater. You’ve told a story over the course of the night. You don’t get to do that when you make a film or TV show.”
Carrie Coon and Tracy Letts are a couple now living in some of the culture’s brightest lights. But they’re theater people – bright lights don’t faze them. “I got my first credit card at 43,” Letts laughed. “It’s a tough gig!”
Besides, they have work to do, the kind that’s most affirming for them: Work they can do together.
Letts said, “I needed somebody who understood what it means to be an artist in America.”
“And I needed somebody who reminded me that it was important to be an artist,” Coon said, “and that it was powerful, and necessary.”
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Extended interview – Tracy Letts and Carrie Coon (Video)
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Extended interview – Carrie Coon (Video)
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Story produced by Gabriel Falcon. Editor: Carol Ross.
