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The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I go for the jugular': Carrie Coon on White Lotus, female friendship and toxic politics
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
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘We Had a World' Review: Through the Fourth Wall and Into the Past
At the onset of Joshua Harmon's wonderfully textured new play, 'We Had a World,' Josh (played by Andrew Barth Feldman) is in his tighty-whities, scribbling in a notebook with a mechanical pencil at a desk on a corner of the stage. Just then his Nana — his dying Nana, to be specific — shows up onstage with a request. She has an idea for a play her grandson should write, a vicious 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'-style work about their family. The play we're seeing, in the intimate basement-esque New York City Center Stage II of the Manhattan Theater Club, is the playwright's answer to his grandmother's request. It's not as vitriolic as Nana had asked for, but it is an all too relatable unpacking of the longstanding resentments and challenging dynamics of a family, particularly the ones between two of the central women in his life, his mother and his grandmother. If there's viciousness here, it's the complex, often vicious nature of the truth. 'We Had a World' is a memory play in which Josh breaks the fourth wall to guide the audience through notable incidents of his childhood and adult life relating to his mother and grandmother. Though the play opens with a phone call between Josh and his Nana at the end of her life, he jumps back chronologically to explain growing up with his grandmother, Renee (Joanna Gleason), an eccentric Manhattanite who takes him to the theater to see 'Medea' and to exhibitions of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. She sneaks them in to catch movies for free and they make regular visits at the Met Museum. He credits his grandmother with helping him find his future vocation in the theater. But it's not long before he discovers a secret about Renee: she's an alcoholic, which is the source of years of animosity between her and Josh's mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), a tough lawyer with a chip on her shoulder. 'We Had a World' gradually works its way back to, and a little bit past, Renee's decline and death, though not in a way that's at all predictable or even linear. Josh remembers and cleverly revises the story as he goes, with Renee and Ellen appearing onstage not just as puppets in his story, manipulated by his telling, but also as autonomous characters who express their own opinions (often, hilariously, at his expense) and intrude to offer their perspectives on events. Harmon's script doesn't feel as didactic or self-consciously stagy as many contemporary memory plays can be; it strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don't just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon's story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family. Though the script successfully condenses several eras of Harmon's life and captures the quirks and particularities of his mother's and grandmother's personalities, the performances really give the material its extra emotional heft. It takes less than 15 minutes to fall in love with Gleason as Renee, the native New Yorker with a dark sense of humor, a love for ornate French furniture and an inexplicable pseudo-British accent. And Serralles's Ellen feels most real when she is at her most defensive and sardonic, though her shifts into the character's more openly vulnerable moments still show some seams. Feldman, who played the title role onstage in 'Dear Evan Hansen' and starred opposite Jennifer Lawrence in the 2023 film 'No Hard Feelings,' is fantastic throughout as Josh — awkward and earnest, often uncomfortable amid the drama, yet always attempting to view his loved ones with openness and fairness. The small thrust stage works well for Feldman, who effortlessly connects with the audience as he transitions from playing the innocent, wide-eyed young child tagging along with his offbeat Nana to the more self-assured, though still lost, writer of several acclaimed plays. Trip Cullman's understated direction and John Lee Beatty's similarly bare-bones set design (a desk, a record player, two tattered love seats, some metal chairs) allow for the focus to remain on the actors and the material, while Ben Stanton's lighting provides a subtle way to signal sudden switches in the story's setting. Harmon's script so authentically re-creates his relationships and experiences that the play's largest fault is how it leaves you wanting more from the tiny narrative wrinkles and secondary characters that are only partially explored. The delightful surprise of 'We Had a World' is not just its personal nostalgia but a more universal one: Josh isn't just mourning certain eras of his relationships or his childhood with his grandmother; he's mourning the New York City of his youth, a time before he felt the urgency of threats to the environment or to democracy. So 'We Had a World' isn't exactly the contentious drama Nana requested, but it's something much more compassionate and real.
The Independent
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Steven Soderbergh's new thriller Black Bag about married spies is brilliant, sexy, and as tight as a drum
Efficiency isn't meant to feel this thrillingly erotic. But that's how love goes in Black Bag, an ode to a poisonously compatible marriage between spies, in which lies are the daggers slipped under a lover's pillow each night. Airtight efficiency is also precisely how Steven Soderbergh 's thriller operates. It starts the moment its plot kicks into gear and never looks back. George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) weaves through a London club. He meets his colleague, who tells him there's a mole in the agency. One of the suspects is his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). And off we go! Black Bag, like Soderbergh's previous effort (Presence, released just over a month ago), is scripted by David Koepp. If that last film, a lo-fi POV horror, offered the most pleasurable demonstrations of craft seen so far this year, then Black Bag cranks that pleasure up several notches. It's lean to the bone, moving swiftly into an extended dinner party sequence built like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? if several of its participants had committed war crimes, only to circle back to the same location later on, as if it were a prowling leopard. Insults here are exquisite little bonbons – 'a perversion of what a man should be' is rebutted with 'you're a diseased creature' – and the dramatic twists are unexpected, yet never overstretched. Everyone's a sociopath, from Tom Burke's lecherously cantankerous Freddie Smalls to Marisa Abela's Clarissa Dubose, who adds to her Industry character's haughtiness a sexual kink for polygraph tests. Regé-Jean Page is the maliciously blasé, Call of Duty-obsessed Colonel James Stokes, and Pierce Brosnan's top dog Arthur Stieglitz breezes through every scene with a Machiavellian cocked eyebrow. Naomie Harris's on-site psychiatrist, Dr Zoe Vaughan, at first seems moderately well-balanced, but she, like everybody else, is compromised by the malevolent vehicle that is international espionage. The keys to tomorrow are in the hands of people who view the soul as the weakest part of the body. Considering the crux of this film is built around what George calls 'fun and games' (translation: 'psychological torture'), the profound loathsomeness of these characters is precisely what draws us in. That, and their luxurious closets full of turtlenecks, suits, and soft leather, dreamt up by costume designer Ellen Mirojnick. Or the seductive twinkle of David Holmes's score. Or Soderbergh's way with the camera (as usual, he serves as both cinematographer and editor), which draws in just close enough that we might catch the tiniest bead of sweat forming on someone's brow. And while the supporting cast are impeccable across the board, it's really Blanchett and Fassbender's film to command, with performances that drip with old-school star power. You get the sense that if Kathryn suddenly started barking orders, everyone in the audience would be powerless but to obey, a kind of presence that hasn't been seen much since Katherine Hepburn (whom Blanchett once played to a tee in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator). Fassbender, when he delicately adjusts his glasses or cuffs, evokes the sly, chilled elegance of a Michael Caine or Dirk Bogarde, but with a sliver of vulnerability in the eyes that really begs the question of what exactly is going on in that head of his. George is ribbed for his 'flagrant monogamy' since no one can believe the couple have been able to maintain a functional relationship within the most dysfunctional of careers. In bed, they swear absolute loyalty, yet whisper the code word 'black bag' to each other whenever a piece of information is officially out of bounds. Is that hypocrisy a delusion? Or part of an intricate set of rules they've become experts in? Is a good marriage built on honesty, or the mutual acceptance that lies are necessary? The answer – well, let's say that's 'black bag' for now.
The Independent
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
White Lotus star Carrie Coon hints she has open marriage with husband Tracy Letts
The White Lotus star Carrie Coon appeared to hint that she and her husband, Tracy Letts, have an open marriage in a new interview. The 44-year-old actor spoke candidly about the dynamics with her partner, whom she's been married to since 2013, during Monday's episode of the WTF with Marc Maron Podcast. She confessed that she and Letts don't get jealous easily, so they often talk about other people they're attracted to. 'It's nice to be in a relationship where we can always talk about, 'Well who are you attracted to on set?'' she explained. 'He notices every single woman on the street, and he always tells me who he has a crush on. It's fun. It's interesting to know what your partner is into.' Maron then interjected to ask: 'But it doesn't ever go over the line?' In response, Coon replied: 'We don't really like lines. Lines are really boring... Life is short. Finite! '... [Letts] would never begrudge anyone the human experience,' she said. 'He's embraced being a person of appetites and acknowledging we have these proclivities.' She went on to share her issues with the traditional expectations of monogamous marriage. 'Monogamy is sort of something we've imposed on ourselves, we were supposed to have babies and die at like 30,' she said. 'And that's not how life is anymore. So you have to kind of be open-minded about what engages you in the world, what sparks your imagination, and what your passion is. 'I think if you're willing to stay open to that, you're living more of a full life. And I don't think either one of us would want to keep the other from living,' she added of her relationship. Coon's comments quickly gained traction on X, with one person resharing a clip of the segment on marriage with the caption: 'Finding out Carrie Coon and Tracy Letts have an open marriage has been a really great way to start my week.' Coon and Letts met in 2010 while starring in the Broadway production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They got married three years later before welcoming their first child, Haskell, in 2018. They also welcomed a daughter in 2021, but have yet to share her name publicly. The Gilded Age star has previously gushed about how grateful she is for her marriage while reflecting on some of the past relationships she'd been in. 'I have a healthy, happy marriage. When I was younger, let's say I didn't always conduct myself with integrity in my relationships. Now I've found a partner who I can be truly honest with, I never want to go back,' she told The Guardian in 2021.
