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.”
