Coon says she is rarely recognised in public. But when she is, it is most often as Nora Durst from The Leftovers, her first major television role. Photo / Washington Post
The acclaimed character actress, who appears in Season 3 of The White Lotus, has mastered the art of emanating mounting fury.
Carrie Coon lives right on the edge – of overwhelming sadness, of righteous fury, of whatever emotion bubbles inside the character she is playing, threatening to boil over. In her breakout television role as a woman who loses her family in the apocalyptic drama The Leftovers, Coon appears collected while always just an unwanted reminder away from anguished waterworks. In The Gilded Age, perceived slights often drive her character, the social-climbing wife of a robber baron, to the brink of indignant tantrums.
On a chilly morning in late January, Coon teeters on the edge of some undetermined illness. She delayed her arrival to a cafe in Pound Ridge after her 3-year-old daughter woke up sick, and now the doting mother, 44, is afraid she caught the bug herself. She orders a ginger tea to soothe her throat before rerecording dialogue later in the week for The White Lotus, the Emmy-winning anthology series whose third season is now screening on Neon and Sky’s HBO.
Every ambitious performer hopes to book The White Lotus. The cheeky class satire set at a luxury vacation resort chain made quite an impression premiering amid the pandemic’s uptick in social consciousness. Coon, regarded by critics as one of the best character actors of her generation, appears in the new Thailand-set season as a New Yorker who goes on holiday with childhood friends as a reprieve from the fallout of her recent divorce. Laurie is a classic Carrie Coon character. She can barely keep it together, hiding behind a stoic exterior until bursting into tears the moment she finds herself alone in her hotel room.
Coon was immediately drawn to creator Mike White’s “specific and special” style of writing. Having acted himself, he knows how to play performers off one another. “However,” Coon continues, “the recovery of my personal autonomy was really the most amazing and profound experience of doing The White Lotus for me.” The job required her to spend six months of last year across the world from her husband, the actor and playwright Tracy Letts, and their two young children (their daughter and a 6-year-old son). She took the opportunity to check in with herself. What really mattered to her at that point in life?
It takes a degree of mental fortitude to walk the emotional tightrope Coon so often does on screen. The actress has spent a lifetime negotiating with her need to feel in control; on The White Lotus, she learned to give in to an unpredictable setting. Filming in Thailand’s record hot temperatures between February and July last year added to the stress Laurie exudes. Coon’s torn feelings over being so far from her family helped her connect to Laurie’s struggles to balance work, motherhood and old friendships.
“When the audience watches it, they experience the resort for a week,” Coon says. “But that week was six months of our lives. When we watch the show, every scene is fraught with the … duress under which it was filmed. It’s a shockingly emotional experience.”
Despite her hectic morning, during which she says she managed to scarf down some two-day-old ramen – “Is that safe?” she wonders after the fact – Coon projects a calmness at the cafe. A barista greets her by name not because she knows her as a celebrity, but because Coon just comes here that often. The actress makes herself at home at a corner table, leaning back in her chair and removing her winter cap to reveal a light blonde bob.
Coon says she is rarely recognised in public. When she is, it is almost always as Nora Durst from The Leftovers, the HBO adaptation of the Tom Perrotta novel set a few years after a rapture-like event causes 2% of the world’s population to disappear. Whereas some families remain intact, Nora is unlucky enough to lose her husband and two children. She brims with existential grief for three seasons as a reluctant face of the global tragedy.
Damon Lindelof, who co-created the series with Perrotta, was struck by Coon’s skill after a casting director recommended he watch her perform in 2013’s Broadway revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which she earned a Tony nomination. Coon had also played the mousy Honey at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, where she met Letts (who played George there and on Broadway, winning a Tony Award for the latter performance).
It becomes obvious after a few minutes of friendly, exceptionally direct chatter with Coon that she has roots in the Midwest. (If you don’t clock this yourself, she’ll likely bring it up on her own.) She grew up the “overlooked middle child” of five siblings in rural Ohio, where she discovered while doing a school play that she thrived onstage. She trained as an actor, getting her master of fine arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and spent years performing in regional theatre, travelling back and forth between Chicago and cities in Wisconsin.
“The beauty of growing up in a theatre community like Chicago is that the overarching aesthetic is ensemble-based,” Coon says. “It’s not about one person standing out … so you learn that you have to be economical with your body in the space so you don’t distract from the storytelling.”
To this day, so many of Coon’s collaborators zero in on her effective use of body language. Lindelof recalls the remarkable stillness with which she played Nora, who he says “needed to appear to be totally mellow and okay, but internally was completely radioactive.”
“If you walked up to her in a room with an emotional Geiger counter, the needle would pin all the way to red,” he says. “But you wouldn’t know it until you had it right up on her. That all came from Carrie. She can tap into this intense, maelstrom of feeling.”
Elizabeth Olsen – who played Coon’s sister in the 2024 release His Three Daughters, about sparring siblings who reunite as their father nears death – says you often can tell whether someone is a good actor by how they act drunk. With Coon, she says, “it’s almost imperceptible.” Coon has played plenty of drunks: Honey grows increasingly intoxicated throughout Woolf, and Laurie relies on liquor as a coping mechanism in The White Lotus. Asked about her approach, Coon notes that “the trap of playing drunk … is that a drunk person is actually very careful, because they’re pretending to be sober.”
“That’s the line you’re always walking,” she says. “I don’t know how successful I was at that in The White Lotus. But let’s just say I had plenty of examples growing up.” (Coon herself hasn’t had a drink in four years, and Letts has been sober for more than 30.)
The actress once struggled to connect with her body so thoroughly. She was an athletic teenager, balancing soccer with track and field alongside her duties as class president, but also dealt with stress by picking at her skin. “Impulse control disorders are often about an absence in yourself,” she says. “Ultimately, it’s an authenticity alarm.” Growing up in the Midwest, Coon was taught to consider everyone else’s level of comfort before her own. “I had spent my entire life metabolising other people’s feelings and had absolutely no idea what I wanted.”
In graduate school, Coon worked with a voice coach who helped her realise she “had never taken a breath in my whole life”. She remembers bursting into tears. Breath work not only increased her vocal endurance, it allowed her to slow down and curb the impulse to pick at her skin. She was no longer at war with herself, which made her a better actor as well.
“I found that so grounding and startling and also liberating,” Coon says. “When you have a voice that’s connected to your body, then as an actor … you get to change how you occur in the world really intentionally, and that’s fun. But it’s also a source of presence in your daily life. Because if your voice is rooted in your body, then you are actually breathing.”
She smiles and takes a sip of her tea.
A few years ago, before their son reached school age, Coon and Letts decided they wanted to live closer to where The Gilded Age shot in New York. They moved from Chicago to Westchester County – specifically, to within driving distance of the BLT sandwich Letts adores at this very cafe. The barista tells Coon that “her guy” stopped by recently and wouldn’t stop gushing about his wife. Coon says that must have been right before Letts left for a job in New Zealand. She misses him.
Coon and Letts take turns prioritising their careers; she worked back-to-back on The White Lotus and The Gilded Age last year, and will now be at home with the kids for the foreseeable future. The dynamic reminds Coon of the “unusually egalitarian marriage” her parents modelled while raising their kids on farmland just outside Akron. Her mother was an emergency room nurse who often worked nights and slept during the day. Her father, who ran the family car-parts store, did most of the cooking and cleaning.
Motherhood is an act of reparenting, Coon says. You borrow what worked from your own childhood and leave behind what didn’t. Coon and Letts’ kids are free spirits. Like their mother, they “love being in the country”. She says their son runs around in the backyard, pausing only to stare up at the treetops. Their daughter doesn’t like to wear pants. Coon pulls out a photo of the girl’s most recent avant-garde outfit and beams with pride.
“I think mothering is a deeply creative act,” she says. “I find it gratifying, and I’m good at it. At the same time, I also have the privilege of stepping away from motherhood because of my job, so I get to see it from the outside and appreciate it in a different way.”
Coon still scheduled swimming lessons and talked to the school psychologist from Thailand, where she holed up inside between takes to avoid the sweltering heat. She related to Laurie, who leaves her life behind to vacation with two glamorous friends, one of them a famous actress. Coon’s co-stars, Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb, “are literally models”, she says. “Laurie feels like the odd man out, and that was easy for me to wrap my head around.”
In a way, none of them is supposed to be there. Resort culture is “exploitative by nature”, Coon says. “It’s very, very rich people taking advantage of very poor ones.” Even as actors who weren’t really there on vacation, it was hard to escape the reality of the country’s environmental devastation. The ocean “felt like a hot bath,” Coon recalls. “There was plastic washing up from last summer. The big coral reef die-off started happening while we were there.”
The characters of The White Lotus aren’t designed to be sympathetic – Laurie included. But it’s almost impossible not to feel some affinity for Coon whenever she appears on-screen. Maybe it’s that Midwest groundedness shining through, suggesting she has a good heart, or the actress’ careful movements demonstrating a relatable nervousness.
Whatever the reason, this quality is what compelled The Gilded Age creator Julian Fellowes to cast Coon as Bertha Russell, the wife of a nouveau riche railroad tycoon who demands respect from New York’s established aristocracy. Bertha schemes her way to the top, motivated in large part by a fragile ego and sheer will. But when she claims to do it all for the betterment of her family, including her two children, you want to believe her.
“I was in completely safe hands with Carrie,” Fellowes says. “She didn’t alienate the viewer. She didn’t put you off. You wanted her to win. That’s a very important element in an actor, when the audience is on their side, even though it may be immoral or near the edge or whatever. It’s a powerful response that, as a writer, one is always seeking.”
The third season of The Gilded Age, which Coon shot immediately after The White Lotus, will premiere on HBO later this year. She loves playing Bertha, swinging her hips and gliding through ballrooms as fancy women tended to back then, but felt a bit of whiplash returning to the character after spending months in Laurie’s traumatised headspace.
“Coming back to a character always feels like putting on a wet bathing suit,” she says. “I felt terrible about the work I was doing those first couple weeks. I wish I could go back and reshoot them, but I don’t remember them now, so it’s all right. I’m not cursed with a memory. I have two small children. I’m pretty good at letting things go.”
This might be one of the ways Coon has evolved most. A few years ago, right after her daughter was born, the actress expressed distaste for her performance in the 2014 thriller Gone Girl, in which she plays the empathetic twin sister of Ben Affleck, whose character is suspected of murder. Booked immediately after she shot the pilot for The Leftovers, Margo Dunne was Coon’s first film role. She felt that you could tell.
Her critical comments made headlines, prompting a swift response from director David Fincher, who defends Coon’s performance to this day: “I don’t have any respect for people who aren’t hard on themselves,” he says. “I love the fact that she’s questioning it. In terms of servicing the narrative, though, she should get over herself. She’s wrong.”
In the film, Coon is again tasked with getting the audience on her side: Margo plays a pivotal role, casting doubt on her brother’s guilt. “The only way you can get any sense that this guy might be a good guy under a lot of pressure is the way Margo feels about him,” Fincher explains. Coon admits she was hard on herself. It’s just that she improved so much doing The Leftovers that she wishes she could have played the character a little bit later.
Self-critique is how Coon gets better. She isn’t afraid to watch herself on a massive screen, to see her pores in high-definition, to watch her characters descend into doom spirals. She has said her family find it difficult to understand why she plays so many sad and angry women when they find her to be rather easygoing. But it might be the peace Coon has made with her demons that allows her to be so calm the rest of the time.
“Look, I’m getting old,” she says. “You have to be able to sit with that and accept that you’re going to get old, and you’re going to die. Everything you love will die and pass away. Including your own f****** face. So just deal with it, you know?”
New episodes of The White Lotus season three are available weekly on Mondays on Neon (from 4pm) and Sky’s HBO (8.30pm)
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