Carrie Coon Makes Her Entrance

Carrie Coon may be prestige TV’s busiest actress. This year she’ll star in both The White Lotus and The Gilded Age.
Carrie Coon Makes Her Entrance Hunter Abrams


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Bertha Russell would be so disappointed. When Carrie Coon, who plays the calculating social climber on The Gilded Age, sits down at the Regency Bar & Grill, just a few blocks and about 140 years from the fictional mansion where her character resides, it’s the tail end of the restaurant’s infamous power breakfast—a crucial error in timing for anyone hoping to rub elbows with New York City’s ruling class. “If you’re not seeing those people, what’s the point?” Coon asks, imagining her character’s horror at the faux pas. “Why are you even out at this hour?” It doesn’t seem to cross her mind that at this very moment she is the room’s main attraction.

Part of what makes Coon so compelling is that she’d seemingly never notice such a thing—or at least she wouldn’t let on if she did. The 44-year-old actress isn’t only the Emmy-nominated star of The Gilded Age, she’s a pivotal player in the much anticipated, shrouded in secrecy third season of The White Lotus (out February 16), as well as a lead in such recent films as His Three Daughters, Lake George, and Another Happy Day. She’s also a veteran of the Avengers and Ghostbusters franchises, as well as pop culture touchstones like The Leftovers, Fargo, and Gone Girl. Still, she says, “the average American doesn’t know who I am. I can walk down the street. I can go to the grocery store. Most of the moms at school have no idea. I’ve had conversations with people about shows I’m on, and they still don’t know they’re talking to me. It’s amazing.”

carrie coon

That may be the case, but possibly not for long. Coon’s back-to-back starring roles on The Gilded Age and The White Lotus, two prestige TV juggernauts, will put her in millions of living rooms, and at the center of endless Monday morning memes, over the coming months. It’s tempting to think of this moment as a grand arrival for the actress, but the truth is Carrie Coon is already at the top of her game; she just hasn’t stopped and waited for us to notice.

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“Carrie exists in her own category,” says David Fincher, the director who gave Coon her first feature film role, as Margo, the twin sister of Ben Affleck’s Nick Dunne, in Gone Girl. “There are a lot of actors about whom people say, ‘Oh, I know her, she’s from…’ but there are very few actors people remember fondly because of the thing that they provided. It’s not that you remember Carrie Coon but that you remember Carrie Coon was fucking great.”

The New York Times has said that Coon’s eyes “should be registered as emotional weapons—deep sapphire lasers that simultaneously suggest intense outward focus and inner emotional vertigo.” Vulture gushed that “whenever she joins a show, it automatically becomes must-see TV.” The Hollywood Reporter recently noted that “Coon is masterful at conveying the space between those inner and outer selves.” In fact, her intensity onscreen has become such a calling card that Mike White, the creator of The White Lotus, says, “I wondered if Carrie Coon would want to be a basic bitch.” White had met Coon almost a decade ago over lunch; the two admired each other’s work, but it took years for them to find a way to collaborate. On the series Coon plays Laurie, a woman on vacation in Thailand with two longtime friends (one of whom, a television actress played by Michelle Monaghan, is footing the bill) and navigating the emotions conjured by the combination of other people’s money, jetlag, and no small amount of white wine.

carrie coon

“The idea was that these three women are on a vacation together, these lovely ladies who all look alike, almost like a big, blonde blob, at least at first glance,” White says. “Carrie is kind of a stealth bomber. You’re not exactly sure what the dynamic of these women is and where her character is going, but trust me, by the end it gets juicy. All of Carrie’s dramatic and comedic skills are put to use. If she seems to be in the shadow of her famous friend, she definitely steps out of it.”

Coon had been a fan of the series (which premiered in 2021 and has won 15 Emmys in its first two seasons), so much so that she went to Thailand for nearly five months of filming. “Of course I was interested in doing the show,” she says. “Every actor is interested in doing this show. Mike really challenged his actors by taking them away from their lives and forcing them into these existential circumstances. He’s satirizing rich people, but it’s always with an eye toward mortality, the human condition, and how we protect ourselves in this world.”

The White Lotus Carrie Coon

Coon doesn’t reveal much else about the drama that unfolds for her character—or the starry collection of other hotel guests played by the likes of Parker Posey, Leslie Bibb, Natasha Rothwell, and Patrick Schwarzenegger, among others—but she does offer one bit of reflection. “My husband wrote in one of his plays that new friends are better than old friends,” she says, referring to Tracy Letts, the actor and Pulitzer Prize–­winning playwright she married in 2013. “I don’t know who would agree with that, but sometimes we have friendships that are out of habit as opposed to shared interests, and that isn’t always apparent to us when we’re spending our lives far from people we love. It’s not until you share space with them that you come up against those issues.”

carrie coon

Sharing that space was less fraught for Coon and her castmates off camera. Although being away from her husband and two young children wasn’t easy (“Knowing that it was going to be in Thailand was an obstacle,” she says, “but it was my husband who said, ‘We will make this work.’ This is one of those must-do jobs that come along every now and then”), the White Lotus team managed to make the most of their time abroad. “There was one resort we stayed in that had a beautiful beach, so we developed a WhatsApp chat for our sunset swim club,” Coon says. “Some nights you’d have 25 of us on beach blankets watching the sunset. At another resort they had a beautiful breakfast, so everybody would spend two hours on a day off just eating from the buffet, drinking all the juices, and stealing the protein bars. It became a joke that we just never left.” When asked about the minibars at the resorts, which co-star Walton Goggins has said the cast members were charged for raiding, Coon says with a chuckle, “Leslie Bibb and I went to the grocery store. We bought our own snacks at a much lower price point.”

carrie coon

Seaside sunsets weren’t always part of Coon’s plan. Growing up in Copley, Ohio, she was a soccer player who landed her first role in a high school production of Our Town. Coon told the New Yorker in 2018 that when she auditioned for the part, “I felt a little bit of power in that moment. I felt the ability to capture people’s attention, and I knew it was important.” After high school she was recruited to play soccer for the University of Mount Union, where she majored in English and Spanish literature and minored in psychology. Then, at the urging of a professor, she attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s graduate acting program. From there Coon joined the American Players Theatre and soon began splitting her time between working onstage in Wisconsin and Chicago. In 2010 she was cast as Honey in a Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of Edward Albee's Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which would travel to Washington, DC, and eventually Broadway, where her performance earned her a Tony nomination. It was also during this run of Woolf that Coon met and began dating Letts; the two would marry in an Illinois hospital in 2013, shortly after the August: Osage County writer had his gall­bladder removed.

In addition to her work in television, Coon has recently starred in such films as His Three Daughters, Lake George, and Another Happy Day.

One night Ellen Lewis, who was casting Lost creator Damon Lindelof’s series The Leftovers, was in the audience for the play. Based on Coon’s performance, Lewis asked her to audition for the series, and she won the role of Nora Durst, a grieving woman who has lost her family to a Rapture-like event. The Leftovers ran for three critically acclaimed seasons on HBO beginning in 2014 and remains the project for which Coon says she’s best known. “The only people who have ever recognized me are Leftovers fans,” she says. “Oftentimes they recognize my voice. They hear me talk, and they whip around and say, ‘Wait a minute—Nora Durst?’ ”

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The Leftovers may have been a big break for Coon, but it wasn’t her only one. The year it debuted she made her first feature film appearance, in Gone Girl, and the year it wrapped Coon also starred in the third season of Fargo, earning an Emmy nomination for that part. In 2020 it was announced that Coon would play Bertha Russell on The Gilded Age, the third season of which is due later this year. It’s a role Coon seems to relish; not only does she work alongside an army of A-list theater actors, she plays a complicated, cunning character who would seemingly give up breathing before she gave up scheming for social prominence. (Of the coming season Coon says, “Bertha’s work is never done, and it will come at a great cost.”)

“Carrie is extremely funny, generous, and considerate in real life,” says Morgan Spector, who plays Bertha Russell’s railroad tycoon husband, George. “I do think she has this sort of emotional abyss inside her, which is part of what gives her tremendous power as an actor. She has this capacity to go to real emotional depths at any moment, and that can be frightening because there is such power in it.”

Seen here on the Upper East Side, Coon actually lives outside NYC with her husband Tracy Letts and their two children.

To hear Coon tell it, her concern on the set of The Gilded Age is keeping up with her co-stars. “I think of those people as being so talented, especially the musical theater people. It’s like, ‘Oh, they’re singing, dancing, and acting,’ ” she says. “When they come onto the set, I am the lady of the manor, but I feel so fake. I feel like such a poser, because that’s Celia Keenan-Bolger or Kelli O’Hara. It’s humbling to be around them.”

That humility, however, might be Coon’s superpower. If she can star in two of television’s most talked-about shows, earn Oscar buzz for her film roles, and still go unrecognized, or thrill at the thought of performing alongside Broadway’s leading ladies, why would she want to have it any other way? “I feel that sometimes success is a real trap,” she says. “People who get famous when they’re young or win an Academy Award in their thirties—where do you go from there?”

Town & Country Magazine Carrie Coon February 2025
Town & Country Magazine / Hunter Abrams

Photographs by Hunter Abrams
Styled by Ryan Young

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Hair by Peter Butler at Tracey Mattingly Agency. Makeup by Rebecca Restrepo for Femmue Skin Care at Walter Schupfer Management. Grooming by Claudia Lake for Chanel and R+Co Bleu. Manicure by Kayo Higuchi for Dior Vernis at Bryan Bantry Agency. Tailoring by Jennifer Yuen at Bedford Street Laundry. Prop styling by Din Morris. Production by Viewfindersny. Shot on location at the Columbus Citizens Foundation

On the Cover: Ralph Lauren Collection embellished dress. Bulgari High Jewelry Serpenti earrings, necklace, Bracelet, and ring

In the top image: Erdem gown. Aquazzura sandals. David Yurman High Jewelry earrings, bracelet, and ring

This story appears in the February 2025 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

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