The first line of Carrie Coon’s Wikipedia entry references the “complex” women she’s known for playing, a characterization that makes the actor smile when I relay it to her. Is she drawn to these “complex” characters, I ask, or has she been typecast?
“The latter,” she says. “We all have a way we present in the world. The perception of me is that I am verbal, intellectual. My voice is lower and I don’t have Botox, so I tend to play older than I am. And so, I’ve always had a gravitas or some authority.”
In real life, with the people who love her, Coon says she’s nothing like the austere or overly introspective women she embodies on screen, most notably as Bertha Russell in The Gilded Age, which returned for its third season on June 22, and as Laurie in the latest season of The White Lotus.
“To my family, I am just a goofball,” she says. Coon shares a seven-year-old son and four-year-old daughter with her husband, playwright and actor Tracy Letts. “It’s surprising when they see the sort of goofier, sillier side of me on camera, which very rarely comes out in the roles I play. It sounds like I protest too much, but I’m easygoing. I’m very lighthearted. I’m very silly. I’m a very silly mom.”
I see this side of Coon myself later, when she stands up in the Zoom to reveal that the oversized black T-shirt she’s wearing is actually a “Railroad Daddy” graphic tee featuring her Gilded Age co-star Morgan Spector, a piece of fan-made merch she likes to whip out for press days.
Coon began her career on the stage, before being catapulted onto Hollywood’s radar with the buzzy HBO drama The Leftovers when she was 33, relatively late in life for an industry that famously rewards the young. As Nora Durst, one of TV’s most enigmatic characters since Tony Soprano, Coon was an instant standout for her portrayal of a deeply flawed, deeply human woman living through an unknowable tragedy. In the 11 years since The Leftovers premiered, she’s landed some of the most coveted, richly written roles set across time and space. Two of them—Bertha Russell on The Gilded Age and Gloria Burgle on Fargo—have earned her Emmy nominations, and that number seems likely to grow thanks to her delicious performance as Laurie, an uptight workaholic in the midst of a mid-life episode in The White Lotus season three.
Unlike other actors at her level of fame, however, Coon disappears within her characters. She is not “Carrie Coon as Laurie” in The White Lotus, she just is Laurie. She’s the kind of actor whose IMDb is a revelation for the casual viewer. (Yes, Bertha Russell and Nora Durst are played by the same person!) She’s starred in some of the most-talked about projects of the past two years, including The White Lotus, The Gilded Age, and the indie hit His Three Daughters, yet can still float among us unnoticed, another blonde woman at the grocery store somewhere upstate.
Even members of the The Gilded Age’s crew have had difficulty placing her. “[A crew member] was talking about me, and he had no idea he was talking to me,” she says of an encounter at the show’s wrap party. “And then he said, ‘And oh my gosh, oh my gosh, that’s you, and this is the worst day of my life.’” She laughs. “At least he said nice things.”
On The Gilded Age, Coon and Spector are George and Bertha Russell, a new-money railroad tycoon and his social-climbing wife. Not all the marriages of the time and place are, to use Bridgerton parlance, “love matches,” but it’s clear that Mr. and Mrs. Russell are well-suited and genuinely in love, flaws—like their tendency towards devious measures in order to get the job done—and all.
In real life, Coon says, “We are both in very successful, respectful marriages. (Spector is married to writer-director Rebecca Hall.) “And so we get to play out some of those values on screen with each other.
“It’s more fun, because the problematic marriage—you’ve seen it. The stuff of drama is trouble. It’s more interesting, actually, to play against that and have a really successful and supportive marriage in this particular time period, where it was even more unusual to have that, to have a woman’s ambition respected in any way—something we [as a society] are still working on.”
She grins mischievously. “It’s so sad how sexy respect is, isn’t it?”
Coon paints an amusing picture of what The Gilded Age set is like off-camera, relaying stories of how she and Spector shed their buttoned-up New York City alter-egos and compare notes on the latest obscure rabbit holes they’ve happened down.
“We’re both super into dilettantish doomsday prep that’s getting more serious as the story unfolds,” she says of their latest random, shared fixation. “I like talking to him about that stuff. He’s my favorite—he’ll say, ’I read another doomsday prepping book that I recommend.’”
But there’s something else to the Russells’ appeal, besides their chemistry, George’s devilishly good looks, and Bertha’s easy-to-root-for quest to infiltrate and upend a snobbish, outdated social class. The pair have an undeniable presence and a maturity about them that reads as trustworthy, assured, and powerful. Trying to articulate this intangible quality, I return again and again to Coon’s voice, which seems of another time, before the invention of “um” or vocal fry. It’s so distinctive that the actor—originally from Ohio, where she says, “we sound like pirates”—is occasionally recognized by her voice alone.
“They hear my voice first, and then they whip around and say, ‘Nora Durst?’” she says of encountering Leftovers fans in the wild. But she didn’t always speak this way.
“My voice was caught in my head and my upper body,” Coon explains. “The work I’ve done being on stage and big houses and working with voice teachers subsequently has helped me root my voice in my body, and it gives you a lot of authority.
“I tell women, and actresses in particular, ‘If you’re talking like this in your little baby voice”—she jumps a few octaves and adds a nasally fry—”that is not threatening. You have no power. You’re giving up all your power in every room.”
Growing up in a small midwest town, the middle child of five siblings, Coon says she didn’t dream of becoming an actor. Or rather, she didn’t understand it as a possibility. She wasn’t a musical theater kid, either—“I can’t walk and sing at the same time”—and didn’t learn to use her voice until much later in life, through graduate school and beyond. To this day, she continues to visit her voice coach before returning to stage acting.
“I started to understand just how vital it is as a woman to be fully voiced,” she says. “You see women in positions of power who aren’t fully voiced, and it actually makes their job harder.” Coon recalls attending a speaking workshop where she was one of two performers—the rest were professionals in other fields.
For Bertha, Coon takes her voice one step lower, a perfect complement to Spector’s own boom. “The dudes on set love it,” she says of his commanding bellow. “He’s like the man everybody aspires to be in a way. It’s very funny.”
I suggest a podcast, a showcase of their stage-trained talents, and Coon tells me they’ve already thought of that.“I can’t remember why we decided not to do it,” she says, then laughs. “Maybe because it was insufferable—it was insufferable, like our lives are. We’re aware of how insufferable our lives can appear from the outside.”
In addition to being “fully voiced,” Coon has another “selfish” hope for the future of young Hollywood: That they’ll stand strong against the pressures to conform, especially when that conformity includes needles, knives, and long recovery times.
“Authenticity is more evocative than any kind of engineering you might consider doing to your face or your body,” she explains, her voice as cool and deep as running water. “Now, this is not the message coming from culture. As a woman who is 44, watching myself in HD is not easy, and it’s not comfortable.” These flashes of insecurity can add up, she says, and manifest as desires to get the Botox injections, the filler, or the newest procedure of the week.
Coon caveats that she is by no means living a monk-like existence free of skincare; baby lasers, also called “lunchtime lasers,” are a favorite indulgence, as is gua-sha and other myofascial massages. “I like science-based skincare,” she says. “But I’m not going to inject anything into my face. It’s just…I think it’s scary and strange.”
Her passion on the subject spills over into her gesticulations, which, paired with her measured manner of speaking, has a hypnotic effect. Coon is a trained theater actor in action, working within the parameters of 16:9 Zoom square, and I am her captive audience.
“It’s a choice I’m making for myself,” Coon continues. “Yes, it’s hard, but I hope that I will continue to work as a character actor—they kicked me out of leading lady status—and I’m very inspired by other women in the business I see who I can tell are also not augmenting their appearance.”
For the record, this is not a criticism of others who have gone under the knife. “No judgment,” says Coon. “You’ve got to do what makes you feel good, what makes you feel like the authentic version of yourself. That is not my place to judge, but I know people are going to judge me.”
Besides, there are other ways to chase the feeling of youth. Coon offers this sage advice: Marry someone—in her case, Letts—older. “That’s a great trick,” she jokes. “You’ll always be young and beautiful when your husband is 15 years older than you.”
The Gilded Age, if you were to understand it solely from the conversations about it on social media, is a sensorial feast—stunning sets and delectable costumes scored by sweeping orchestral tracks—but one devoid of any nutrients. The frothy storylines center unserious people where the stakes are measured in gossip column mentions and invites to the season’s most exclusive parties. It’s the Real Housewives of New York City for period drama fans, courtesy of Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes.
But as any Bravo fan can attest, these high-society social dramas are about so much more than just the hottest fashions of the fall/winter 1882 season. Like The White Lotus, The Gilded Age tells stories of class dynamics, the experience of both the uber rich and those that serve them. I ask Coon, who grew up working class, if she felt especially drawn to these roles and their stories of excess and poverty, or if the two projects’ themes were coincidence.
“I think it’s just in the zeitgeist, because we are living in a time of tremendous economic stratification,” Coon says. “Though, I relate more closely to a working class and middle class background than I do the more erudite characters I tend to play. That is very far from my own personal experience.”
Not for the first time during our conversation, I see Coon slipping into performance mode, passionately making points and indulging in tangents as they come to her. I think back to her observation that she “presents” as an intellectual and know that she’s wrong. She is an intellectual.
“Certainly, it’s the thing capitalism encourages us to strive for—wealth and influence,” she says. “Everyone’s trafficking in the performance of self.”
She leaves me with a few questions to ponder, a take-home assignment. “I do think our art is dealing with those questions of what does it mean? Why are we doing it? Where is the pressure coming from? And would it be even remotely possible to live in another way? It’s a question we haven’t even started asking yet.”
Photographer – Andrew Yee at Atelier ManagementStylist – Alicia LombardiniHair – Ben Skervin @ WSMMakeup – Rebecca Restrepo @ WSMManicurist – Marie Barokas @ L’atalier
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