“Oh, man, it’s a real return to form,” Carrie Coon says of her short hair, which she sported throughout her childhood and young adulthood. It’s a sharp contrast to the long brunette locks of Bertha Russell, her character on HBO’s The Gilded Age. “It connects me to a kind of boyish, Puckish freedom. There’s something really anti-establishment about it too. I feel like everybody should be bringing a little bit of ‘fuck you’ into all their spaces right now.”
That anti-establishment attitude propels the play Coon is now starring in on Broadway. The Tony nominee is making a return to theatre after a four-year hiatus—the longest of her career—in Bug at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. The nerve-racking play, penned by Coon’s husband, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts, will open January 8. This will mark the long-awaited Broadway debut of the nearly 30-year-old work, which had a staging at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2020 and 2021. The full cast of the David Cromer-led 2021 production—including Namir Smallwood, Randall Arney, Jennifer Engstrom, and Steve Key—are reprising their performances on Broadway.
Coon has not appeared on a Broadway stage since the 2012 revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (also a Steppenwolf transfer) where she and Letts first met; he played George, she the supporting role of Honey. In Bug, Coon is in full leading-lady mode as Agnes White, a drug-addled waitress, living in a motel and grieving the loss of her young son, kidnapped out of a grocery cart while he and his mom were shopping. Agnes meets Gulf War veteran Peter Evans (played by Smallwood), who draws her into his increasingly intense and violent paranoia—believing that their shared room is infested with government-controlled creepy crawlies. For Coon, the play is more love story than psychological thriller, and she finds herself in rehearsal feeling “touched” by Agnes and Peter’s desperation.
“These are people who don’t have any power in the world,” Coon says. “Feeling like you have power and agency in a world where all these structures are coalescing against you, to crush you, to feel that you are important, that you are the key to unlocking the plan to escape from that machine, is very powerful.”
Coon’s exhilaration about and empathy for these characters comes from the ways she witnessed audience members' reactions to Bug change pre- and post-COVID. The 2020 run, which ended two weeks prematurely in the onset of the shutdown, felt “like a rock concert” until news of the virus began to spread. When Bug returned in November of 2021, conspiracy theories could be heard everywhere from Chicago coffee shops to the White House. QAnon, the far-right political conspiracy cult, was in the zeitgeist. Many were preoccupied with how to save family members from falling into one of the darkest movements on the internet.
“There’s a line [from the play] I can’t unhear,” Coon says. “‘We’ll never really be safe from the machines.’ And here we are in the rise of this new AI technocratic revolution. These conspiracy theories have not only taken root, but they’re driving policy. I hear the play differently [now]. I hear what is going to resonate with audiences in a different way.”
Coon’s presence onstage in itself will impact audiences differently. Coon first gained critical acclaim for her on-screen performance in The Leftovers and, later, in third season of Fargo. In the last three years, Coon’s ruthlessly ambitious Bertha Russell (fans call her “Opera Mommy”) and achingly unfulfilled Laurie Duffy in The White Lotus have gained her huge cultural capital. At the photoshoot for this interview, Coon uncomfortably reminds her team of a directive she’s been given to capture—and post—more glamorous, behind-the-scenes content, satisfying the appetite of her growing fanbase.
“I think I’ll have a lot of people waiting outside the stage door who didn’t actually see the play,” she says. “If you want me to sign an autograph, come and see my play! Don’t just come and beg me for an autograph at the door.” It’s a double-edged sword; Coon recognizes that her career rise has afforded her the opportunity to bring Bug to Broadway, acknowledging that the success of a commercial theatre production is often dependent on “a certain echelon of star” on the marquee. This reality, paired with the reality of our government’s divestment in the arts, sprinkles her gratitude for this run with a bit of sadness.
“I’m grateful that my career has ascended to such a degree that I can actually be in a play [on Broadway],” she says. “But I’m also sad, because there are a bunch of extraordinary theatre actors who don’t have television and film careers who no longer get to headline plays. Here I am. I’m grateful for it. I’ll take it.”
Five years after she first starred in Bug and now the mother of two young children, Coon finds herself feeling compassion for Agnes, a woman whose desperation for control in the wake of her son’s kidnapping makes her vulnerable. Playing Agnes has exposed a sensitivity Coon never anticipated she would have, one she hadn’t felt before she had children of her own.
“When I imagine what happens to Agnes with her son,” Coon says, drawing a breath. “And I imagine the possibility of that in my life, it's so terrifying. It touches a nerve that's so raw, you almost can't go into it.” Another double-edged sword—while motherhood has exposed a new possibility of pain, it has also fueled the fire for Coon’s artistic rebellion.
“It feels subversive to be an artist,” Coon says. “Because we are in a country that fundamentally doesn’t support the arts. It’s pretty aggressively against the humanities. That also feels like part of the ethos of being an artist right now—going against the expectations.” Coon’s embracing a standard of subversion, from the projects she picks to the way she styles her hair. It’s a restoration of self, an affirmation of her craft. “It feels good,” she says with a smile. “It feels punk rock.”
