NEW YORK (WS News) — It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in “The Gilded Age,” for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of “The White Lotus,” which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs’ new drama, “His Three Daughters,” in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
For her, it casts a different light on her work.
“On one hand, I’m grateful that I get to provide some joy in the form of ‘The Gilded Age’ for example. But I’m also complicit in the pacification machine that’s keeping people’s heads down. So I’m conflicted about that,” Coon says. “Revolution is what’s called for. But I don’t think the human race is up for it. So I really wrestle with my own inaction in the face of that helplessness.”
Coon can’t stop from laughing at herself. “I’m basically a doomsday prepper without an insulated basement for my supplies or an AR-15 to protect them,” she says.
Another way to look at Coon’s concern is as an extension of her interest, as an actor, in the human condition. The global community is maybe another ensemble that Coon would like to play a role in, and see through to the next act.
“As an artist, I don’t know how you can be ignorant about it,” says Coon. “You have to engage with those questions. It’s life and death. It’s the full scope of human existence.”
