Carrie Coon, photographed by Luca Bertea.
When Justin Theroux got on a Zoom call with Carrie Coon the morning after seeing her new play Bug, he began to notice some through lines in the actor’s body of work. From 2014 to 2017, the two co-starred in The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof’s prodigious HBO series about the end of the world. And Coon, of course, plays Bertha Russell in The Gilded Age, an upstairs-downstairs drama about the ruthless ruling class in late-19th century Manhattan. Bug, however, brings the actor’s artistic preoccupations to untold degrees of panic and paranoia. The play, running at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre until February 22nd, was written almost 30 years ago by Coon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning husband Tracy Letts, though the story—of two layabouts in a seedy motel room being driven progressively insane by drugs, suspicion, and conspiracy theories—registers with a sneaky prescience. “That big, beautiful monologue that’s given in the second act,” Theroux said, “it reads like it’s from QAnon.” It’s a tour de force performance—the cast, Coon confessed, is “beat to shit”—and one of the more anxiety-inducing productions to hit the New York stage in years. So how did she pull it off? Theroux came prepared with questions, some of which, he admitted, were “ripped from the lips of Barbara Walters.”
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CARRIE COON: We won’t be as charming as Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, but we can try. Have you seen all those interviews? They’re so goddamn charming.
JUSTIN THEROUX: Well, hopefully they’re going to put some scissors to this and make us just seem fabulous.
COON: Make us sound good.
THEROUX: How are you doing? Are you exhausted?
COON: Totally exhausted.
THEROUX: It felt great to go to a Broadway show where it felt—and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way—like you could see its playwright. Even the set seemed a little small for the space in a great way, in a very claustrophobic way. But I realize how rare it is to go see a show that’s just a straight play that doesn’t have four celebrities in it or whatever. When did you first read this play? I’m curious.
COON: Well, you’re right to point that out, and this is probably the largest house Bug has ever been in, because it was written to be in a black box storefront theater where the audience is really close to the action. When Tracy [Letts] was courting me, he gave me all his plays to read. I’m not sure I got to it then, but I joined the ensemble at Steppenwolf, and it was right after I did Tracy’s adaptation of Three Sisters. And Anna Shapiro came to offer me a position in the ensemble and, with it, she brought the offer of doing Bug with Namir [Smallwood]. I hadn’t really read it, but I had seen the movie.
THEROUX: This was when?
COON: I guess it was maybe 2019, 2020. I was still a little young to play Agnes. She’s technically 44 in the script, as she says, but I was 40 or whatever. Michael [Shannon] was with the play for several years, and he left the New York production as soon as he could, because it’s such a physical part. We’re all just beat to shit. I mean, we’re just covered in bruises and cuts.
THEROUX: Maybe I’m not allowed to give spoilers, but that punch that happened was so—
COON: Oh, yeah.
THEROUX: That punch was beautifully-timed.
COON: Oh, good. Marcus [Watson] did our fight choreography. He’s really great.
THEROUX: And Marcus also did the intimacy coordination?
COON: He did. He does both, which is fascinating. But what he realized is that violence is intimate. And violence often happens between intimate partners and is often part of scenes that include intimacy. So he decided to train in both.
THEROUX: That’s so interesting.
COON: Tracy’s so proud of the piece, because it’s so him. It’s so his voice at 30. And when he listens to it, he says there are lines he maybe would’ve changed now that he’s older and knows more, but he really stands by it.
THEROUX: He should stand by it. When you watch a play that hasn’t been done or that was written a long time ago, you look for those tells. The only thing that I could really tell was the telephone ringing and no cell phone. But that big, beautiful monologue in the second act, I mean, it reads like it’s from QAnon.
COON: It does.
THEROUX: I was curious whether that was updated at all.
COON: Not at all. And all the language about technology, it just goes to show you how long these conspiracy theories have been around. I mean, some of that language was pulled straight from the deep dive Tracy did on the very early days of the internet, right after the Oklahoma City bombing.
THEROUX: Timothy McVeigh. That’s so interesting. I’m seeing a theme in your work writ large—you did a television show, which I participated in, about the world disappearing. You’re currently doing a play which is steeped in conspiracy. And you do another show, I’d be remiss to say, with my talented wife [Nicole Brydon Bloom]—
COON: Your very talented wife.
THEROUX: Where the wealthy ruling class dominate the world. This is a very standard, junket-y kind of question, but is that something you choose, or where you just gravitate?
COON: I think that’s just the art that gets made. Tracy would say that artists are just absorbing what’s happening in the zeitgeist. I think that’s happening in TV as well, and I happen to be working in the medium, so I get to have a job.
THEROUX: Yeah. So I have a couple questions. I looked at Barbara Walters, because she famously asked amazing questions.
COON: Oh, wow. What a great way to prepare. I’m so impressed.
THEROUX: So I’m going to ask you some questions that are ripped from the lips of Barbara Walters.
COON: Are you going to do the speech impediment?
THEROUX: I could, although this is in print.
COON: Too soon?
THEROUX: She famously asked Vladimir Putin in 2001, “Have you ever ordered someone killed?”
COON: No.
THEROUX: Good.
COON: Not yet.
THEROUX: And she asked Muammar Gaddafi, “Why do people believe you are mad?”
COON: Like, crazy?
THEROUX: Yeah, like a madman.
COON: You know what I think? People in the industry—directors, for example—are expecting a really intense personality, bordering on a crazy they associate with actresses on some level. And they are always shocked by my lightness of being and that I don’t take myself too seriously, because we’re all going to die.
THEROUX: It reminds me of our good friend, Ann Dowd.
COON: Who has the greatest sense of humor.
THEROUX: And could not be a lighter person in general. I mean, it’s obviously a testament to your incredible acting ability that people have that misconception of you.
COON: Well, thank you. It might just be because no one will let me do comedy, or maybe I’m not that good at it. I don’t know.
THEROUX: Well last night when I saw the play, I was laughing a bit more than I think people were giving themselves permission to.
COON: Yes. People often will chastise other people in the theater for laughing when they don’t feel it’s appropriate.
THEROUX: But there were so many funny moments, like that beautiful, kind of mimetian overlapping that happens between the four of you.
COON: Tracy’s funny. He’s funny on purpose.
THEROUX: He’s wildly funny.
COON: And people are allowed to laugh. He always says, “If an audience is laughing, then they’re listening.” And I’ve never trusted anything that’s overly serious. You know this because of your work, too. If it doesn’t have a sense of humor, it doesn’t feel rooted in the truth, which is because human beings rely on gallows humor to get through whatever it is we’re doing here on this planet. Remember how season one of The Leftovers was a little bit humorless because of where Damon [Lindeloff] was in his life? But then the show opens up into something so much wilder and weirder, and just gets so much more interesting because of it.
THEROUX: Yeah. There were just so many funny moments. And when doing The Leftovers, both of us had to cry copious amounts, but I found it extremely cathartic.
COON: Yes.
THEROUX: It was kind of like getting to have a tantrum, but not having to deal with any of the emotional hangover at the end of the day.
COON: I’m gratified to hear you say that. I remember Tom Perrotta was on set one time when I had to have one of those big old breakdowns. We wrapped and I said, “All right, Tom, I’ll see you tomorrow.” And he said, “You drop it just like that?” And I’ve always maintained that I find actors in general are very healthy because we’re invited to be fully expressed.
THEROUX: I think so too. Back to my hodgepodge of questions… I’m a huge fan of creative relationships, or people that are both creative in them, and sometimes in the same field. I’m sure it’s helpful when you’re considering something to be able to bounce it off of Tracy. Now doing a play together, take me inside the process. Does it ever get dicey or tricky, or is it like living with the dramaturge? And how does he either build or dismantle that boundary?
COON: It’s interesting, because this is a play, of course, that Tracy already published. It’s 30 years old. So it’s not a play where he’s in the room every day, because it’s already written. There were no changes made. He would pop into rehearsal to answer questions sometimes. Questions like, “What is it really like to smoke crack?” But what’s most fun is working with Tracy on one of his new plays, which I’ve now done a couple of times. He’s so collaborative, and he has a dramaturge that he’s worked with for many years. He has these two female assistants who are so smart and who he adores. They’re both playwrights themselves. The actors are in the room, obviously, and he doesn’t have any ego in that process, so everybody is participating in making the play better. He is open to feedback, he’s open to cutting lines, he’s open to long emails coming in from his assistants or his dramaturge in the night because they’ve been mulling something over. He understands the kind of medium theater is, which is about collaboration. He’s not a novelist. And it’s also less lonesome than writing a screenplay, where you can be fired or it can be taken away from you and rewritten by somebody else and still have your name on it, weirdly.
THEROUX: Is it okay to talk about addiction or—
COON: Yeah, Tracy’s very open about all that, as am I.
THEROUX: Obviously, there’s so much drug use in the play, and I’ve had a little experience with it myself, and I understand that smoking cocaine can often make you find bugs on yourself. But then there comes a moment in the play when someone enters who we haven’t seen, and I really couldn’t figure that character out. And I’m going, “Is he a part of your drug-addled imagination or is he actually…?” And is that intentional?
COON: Yes.
THEROUX: Okay.
COON: Tracy wanted you to be able to walk away and debate whether or not Dr. Sweet is actually there, whether or not the Lloyd conversation even happens, how far gone they are.
THEROUX: Particularly when it gets into the conspiracy theories, I kept looking for some sort of commentary about the nucleus of the American psyche or—
COON: Tracy’s examination of the American psyche probably got more sophisticated when he wrote August: Osage County. And if you go back and read that play, there’s a really solid metaphor at work. And what Tracy’s always been good at is planting seeds in act one that come to fruition in act two. For Bug, I think he was interested in people he’d never had seen on stage. He grew up in a working-class town in Oklahoma. I grew up in a working-class town in Ohio. Literally, one of my loved ones screamed at me on the phone about eight weeks ago, “They’re eating me.” So this community is not far from me. Initially, I think it was mostly about him being interested in seeing people depicted that he hadn’t seen before. But ultimately the play is about how we make meaning and how we answer the question, “Who did this to me?” And I think we are seeing, politically in this country, the rush to fill that void when people are asking that question. And it’s pretty scary.
THEROUX: Is it seeking comfort?
COON: Meaning, comfort, purpose, right? Isn’t there an epidemic of loneliness? Isn’t that really what social media said it was going to fix but is actually compounding?
THEROUX: Maybe we shouldn’t put the trust of our social lives into the hands of—
COON: The machines.
THEROUX: I actually mean billionaires. [Laughs]
COON: Yeah. But what I appreciate about the play is that, on some level, these people go out on their own terms. For the first time in her life, Agnes feels empowered and like she has answers. As terrifying as that is, there’s something to be said for at least going out on your own terms. If the system is crushing you and your efforts to rise above those conditions are futile, there are worse things you could do.
THEROUX: That’s so true. Back to my questions. [Laughs] Hold on.
COON: Are you ever going to get back to the theater, or is it just too hard now?
THEROUX: You know what? I’ll be honest. When I was watching the play last night I was like, “God, this would be exhausting.” Everyone thinks, “Oh, it’s theater. You got the whole day to yourself, you do two hours at night, and then you’re done.” And of course, no one takes into account the adrenaline spike after the show, so you’re up until two in the morning. But if the New York Theatre Workshop called, I’d probably come back and do a play.
COON: Something good.
THEROUX: Short run, blah, blah, blah.
COON: You won’t for a while, because you’re about to have a baby.
THEROUX: I know.
COON: And you’ll find that the theater schedule’s bad for children.
THEROUX: How’s it going?
COON: Hard. In some ways, it’s harder to do theater when you have kids than it is to do TV and film. Even though the hours in TV and film are long, you almost always have the weekends off. But this morning, Justin, I opened the play last night. We left the party early, drove home. I woke up at 6:45. I made breakfast. I packed lunch. Tracy took Haskell to a school visit, because he’s interviewing now to go to his next school up here. I took my daughter to school. I came home. One of my refrigerators is broken. I made a grocery list. I went to the grocery store right before this interview, and I haven’t brushed my teeth or washed my face.
THEROUX: Now it’s 12 PM, so what’s the schedule for the rest of the day?
COON: I don’t know if I’ll get a workout in, but I was hoping to. I will go take a ride with my nanny and my daughter to go pick up my son at the school he’s visiting in Connecticut, just to get the lowdown from him on how the day went. They will drop me at the train station, maybe in Stamford. I’ll hop on the train. I’ll get into Grand Central. I’ll go straight to the theater and do a warmup, then do the show, then hopefully get to bed. I mean, it’s not easy. But we’ve got a lot of great people helping us and we’re fortunate we can afford to have great people helping us. I wouldn’t be working if we couldn’t afford to have great people helping us. So it’s a lot to juggle, which you’re going to find out.
THEROUX: I’m about to find out all of this. Okay, my last couple questions are questions that people ask at tech firms, like if you were going to do an interview at Google.
COON: [Laughs] Oh, okay.
THEROUX: Tell me about a significant project failure and what you learned.
COON: Gosh, this is so cruel.
THEROUX: You don’t have to name the project. You can say whether it was a creative failure, or a commercial failure, or something along those lines. But I think the key part of the question is what you learned.
COON: It might be boring or obvious to say, but it’s important to articulate that you do, in fact, learn the most from failure.
THEROUX: Yes.
COON: We recently had an experience where we just kind of said yes to something without articulating very clearly what we would need to make it work for our family. Maybe we were taking a lot of pride in being easygoing, but we had to learn to be more upfront about what the circumstances were that were required to make sure we could be successful inside of a project with this family in tow that we have. And I am still learning, even from those days when we did The Leftovers, when I didn’t know anything about the business and I felt that all of you guys knew more than I did because you had been working in TV for so long. I just felt very insecure about what I didn’t know.
THEROUX: I didn’t get that impression.
COON: I know, because I was faking it so hard. But I really didn’t know anything and I was scared and insecure.
THEROUX: Well, it makes me sad that you felt that way. But at the same time, you were so confident in your performance.
COON: Yeah, I would agree with that. And Justin, I have to tell you, there are so many people coming to see Bug who are there purely because they’re just diehard Leftovers fans.
THEROUX: I actually signed a couple Leftovers pictures last night on the way out of the theater.
COON: You did. It’s so deeply meaningful to people.
THEROUX: It’s just one of those shows. And I actually don’t take much credit for it, because those scripts were so bled on and so beautifully written. But it’s that rare thing in work where you really realize, “Oh, we were so lucky.” And then you think, “Shit, I should have enjoyed myself more during that job.” But with The Leftovers, I really felt like I enjoyed that work.
COON: Yeah, you could feel that. And they’re not all like that.
THEROUX: I’m looking back at my questions. There’s one that Barbara Walters asked Barbara Streisand: “Why didn’t you get your nose fixed?” And here’s another one to Dolly Parton: “Is it all you?”
COON: Well, yes.
THEROUX: And in 1999, Barbara Walters asked Elizabeth Taylor, “Do blondes have more fun?”
COON: Well, there is something about the platinum that makes people see me in a different way. You know what’s interesting? People don’t see me when my hair is dark. I would get recognized when I was platinum, probably because the bob in The White Lotus was platinum, but when my hair goes back to my normal color, that all goes away. And also because I’m a mom in Westchester in sweatpants who doesn’t brush her teeth, no one’s knocking down my door. But I’m also out there representing what it means to be 44. It’s interesting that those questions often come up in interviews with women. Things like, “Why didn’t you get your nose fixed?” Things that your mother would ask you.
THEROUX: I was like, “I can’t believe she asked these questions.” She raked Monica Lewinsky over the coals.
COON: Well, we’ve come some distance. Maybe we just chastise people for it now, but it’s not like people aren’t still thinking it.
THEROUX: It’s true. Well, thank you so much, Carrie.
COON: It’s great to see you, hon. I love talking to you.
