When Carrie Coon was five years old, she would lie awake at night contemplating the apocalypse. “I was so ready for the end of the world,” she said recently. “We weren’t evangelicals or anything, but I knew about the Book of Revelation, and I knew that Jesus was supposed to come back.” Coon was raised Catholic, in Copley, Ohio, and her father had gone to seminary before returning to run the family auto-parts store. “My parents would be watching ‘Johnny Carson’ or whatever, and I’d come out of my bedroom and say, ‘O.K., when is the world ending?’ ” she recalled. When they assured her that it wouldn’t be during her lifetime, she would say, “But you don’t know that. We don’t know when it’s happening.”
Decades later, Coon landed a role on the HBO drama “The Leftovers,” based on Tom Perrotta’s speculative novel, in which two per cent of the world’s population has spontaneously disappeared in a Rapture-like event, known as the Sudden Departure. The remaining ninety-eight per cent is left dumbfounded, and world religions crumble amid a surge of cults and charlatans. One woman, Nora Durst, has lost her husband and two children: her entire family gone in an instant.
In the novel, Nora spends her days taking long bike rides and cataloguing episodes of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” her children’s favorite show. But Damon Lindelof, whose previous show, “Lost,” ran on ABC for six seasons, and who created “The Leftovers” with Perrotta, decided that, for television, Nora should be more active. “It’s not that her children are dead—it’s that they’re gone in some sort of existential, supernatural phenomenon,” he told me. “She can’t really get to the last stage of grief, because that’s acceptance, and it’s not like she can go the cemetery and visit her kids’ graves. There’s always this lingering desire that they may be back.”
Lindelof told the show’s casting director, Ellen Lewis, that he wanted Nora to have an “unpredictable, dangerous frequency sizzling underneath the surface.” Lewis urged him to attend the Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” in which Coon was playing Honey, the drunken wife of a biology professor. Honey is the smallest part in the four-person play, but Coon managed the near-impossible feat of stealing several scenes from the warring central couple, George and Martha. The Times critic Charles Isherwood, reviewing the production, which began in Chicago, at Steppenwolf Theatre, wrote that Coon “imbues the sozzled Honey with a sweet sympathy and a hint of a backbone.”
Lindelof brought her in for an audition. “There’s nothing more exciting than the first time you see an actor and they’re just that character,” he said. Coon was among the first people cast in “The Leftovers,” along with Justin Theroux, who played the protagonist, a police chief struggling to maintain order in a small Northeastern town. In the pilot, Nora appears in only one scene, giving a speech at a tribute to the Departed. “Who wants to get up in front of a big crowd and say, ‘I am in incredible pain?’ ” Lindelof said. “There’s actually kind of a performative quality to what Nora is doing, and Carrie intuitively understood that.” As he and Perrotta developed the rest of the season, they found themselves tailoring the scripts to take advantage of Coon’s ability to embody peculiar contradictions: her Nora was blithe yet stricken, rational yet moody, blunt yet self-obfuscating. In Episode 2, the writers put an unexplained handgun in Nora’s purse. A few episodes later, it was revealed that, in her spare time, Nora wears a bulletproof vest and hires prostitutes to shoot her in the chest—apparently, a way of coping with her buried grief. “Carrie gave us latitude to be a little bit nuts,” Lindelof said.
The recent glut of well-funded television experiments has bred a crop of unconventional stars—among them Elisabeth Moss (“The Handmaid’s Tale”), Rami Malek (“Mr. Robot”), and Taraji P. Henson (“Empire”)—whose idiosyncrasies might have stalled their success in movies. Coon, who is thirty-seven, rose up through the Wisconsin repertory-theatre scene—hardly a typical path to stardom. Although she often winds up in roles that revolve around faith and uncertainty, she exudes a Midwestern pragmatism, which she knows can have its own kind of mystery. Her shrewd eyes and inconspicuous beauty allow her to play “ordinary” women—or women who tell themselves they’re ordinary while suppressing an inner wildness or desperation. (As a writer for Vulture put it recently, “Watching Carrie Coon dance right up to the line of losing her shit is one of the greatest pleasures TV has to offer.”) Her characters often seem at once sane and unhinged, either affecting normalcy when they’re quietly imploding or showing startling sanity amid extreme adversity. Last fall, she starred in the Off Broadway play “Mary Jane,” as a single mother managing the needs of her chronically ill child. Instead of pitying herself or revelling in martyrdom, Mary Jane handles her duties with chipper competence. (When another mother warns her, “Your trauma’s written in the cells of your body,” Mary Jane responds, “I feel pretty O.K. most of the time. I’m tired?”) The playwright, Amy Herzog, wrote the script with Coon in mind. “There was something about Carrie that’s so plainspoken,” Herzog told me. “In a story like that, you tend to want to leap to the inspiring lesson, and Carrie had a way of dwelling in the experience without doing that. She’s genuine without being syrupy.”
On “The Leftovers,” Nora began as a secondary character, but in the course of three seasons Coon so decisively took over the show that the last episode was titled “The Book of Nora.” Lindelof, who many people thought had botched the finale of “Lost,” was under pressure to wrap up “The Leftovers” in a way that wouldn’t inspire its small but fervent fan base to take up pitchforks. The job was left largely to Coon, who was given an eight-minute monologue that didn’t so much solve the enigma of the Sudden Departure as leave viewers with a question: Did they believe Nora’s explanation or not? “The show at that point was so much about faith, and we wanted to ask our audience if they could have faith in Nora,” Perrotta said. “We understood that we were going to rely on Carrie’s ability to deliver this monologue, and, oddly, as writers, that created a real sense of confidence on our part, because we knew that we were handing it over to a master.”
As the last season of “The Leftovers” aired, Coon also starred in the third season of FX’s “Fargo,” as a folksy policewoman named Gloria Burgle—a variation on Frances McDormand’s character from the original Coen-brothers movie. Its finale, too, was ambiguous and rested on Coon, who faced the season’s arch-villain, an ostentatiously corrupt British businessman, in an interrogation scene that turned surprisingly philosophical. Like McDormand, Coon had the difficult task of creating an understated heroine driven more by common sense than by raw emotion or you-go-girl defiance. At the end of 2017, Entertainment Weekly hailed Coon’s “year of dominating prestige TV,” and she was nominated for an Emmy, for “Fargo,” alongside Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon, Reese Witherspoon, and Nicole Kidman.
In her early career, Coon was often cast in melodramatic roles, such as Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. “My family was always wondering why I ended up playing people who were mentally ill, insane, downtrodden, and a little crazy,” she told me. “I think what they don’t understand is that most female parts are written basically as hysterical women. Drama comes from crazy if women are involved. And that’s only now starting to shift.” She continued, “We haven’t evolved a hero story that’s female. We’re always trying to fit women’s stories into this male structure, which is this rising action, this powerful conflict, and this falling action. And I think a female hero story is not that. It’s something else. Women are trying to recover their voices, which is a much quieter, deeply existential, and frustrating journey.”
Coon described her role in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” as having launched the rest of her life. When she auditioned, in 2010, she was obscure even in Chicago theatre circles. Four years out of graduate school, she was making money playing moms in TV commercials, proofreading dissertations, doing motion-capture work for video games, and, for a brief time, meeting strangers in parking lots at all hours, for an on-demand H.I.V.-testing service.
In the days leading up to her audition, Coon went on YouTube and watched one of Uta Hagen’s master classes on acting, in which Hagen gives advice on how to play drunk. (Don’t act loose and chaotic; act like you’re trying that much harder to be precise.) “I spent some time before the audition in my apartment in a slip, with my hair in rollers, with a little cigarette, and I got some brandy or some port wine,” Coon recalled. “I didn’t get drunk, but I would just sip it throughout the day—because I had nothing else to do—and make a grocery list. I really wanted that part.”
At the callback, she met Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, who were playing George and Martha. Both were major figures at Steppenwolf, the mother ship of Chicago theatre. Letts, now fifty-three, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “August: Osage County,” which premièred there in 2007, and Morton starred in its original run. Days later, Coon was in a bikini, about to go in for a beer commercial, when her agent called to tell her that she’d been cast as Honey. The revival opened in Chicago in December of 2010 and moved to Broadway eighteen months later. By then, Coon and Letts were a couple. They married in August, 2013.
This past January, I visited Coon at the three-story house she has shared with Letts for five years, in the hip Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago. The house, which Letts bought with “August: Osage County” money, was built in the early two-thousands, in a mid-century-modern style. Since she moved in, she and Letts had been away working non-stop: Letts on “Lady Bird” (as Saoirse Ronan’s father) and on the TV shows “Homeland” and “Divorce,” and Coon on “Gone Girl” (she played Ben Affleck’s sister), “The Leftovers,” “Fargo,” and “Mary Jane,” for which she won an Obie and a Lucille Lortel Award. A few months earlier, they had finally been in the same place at the same time, both playing small parts in Steven Spielberg’s “The Post.” Coon was now six months pregnant with their first child, a boy.
Coon has a bright, buzzing energy that belies the weighty roles she’s best known for; after her TV annus mirabilis, she was dismayed to receive multiple offers to play, as she put it, “grieving mothers, cops, grieving mom cops.” (After “Virginia Woolf,” she was offered drunk housewives.) Her character in “Mary Jane”—whose preternatural cheeriness shrouds a spiritual unease—was closer to her personality. The play had opened an expanse of questions for Coon: What is the purpose of suffering? Is it a kind of gift to be living a life of overwhelming hardship? Or is there something deluded in imagining that someone else’s suffering could be a gift to you?
Coon showed me around the house, which Letts, who was upstairs in his office, had decorated, before she moved in, with Danish-modern chairs, an oversized poster for the Bertolucci film “Il Conformista,” and his collection of pulpy illustrations from vintage men’s magazines. There was only one room she had made her own: a carpeted office stuffed with books. To prepare for “Mary Jane,” she had read “Strange Beauty,” Eliza Factor’s memoir of raising a son with disabilities. For “The Leftovers,” she had relied heavily on “Wave,” by Sonali Deraniyagala, a Sri Lankan economist whose family was swept away by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. “It became a totem, almost like a meditation,” Coon said. “I’d read it in the morning, maybe before work, before going through hair and makeup. And then I’d have it on set with me. I could open it to almost any point, and any paragraph would be evocative in a useful way that just reminded you of the magnitude of her loss. A toenail, a dead leaf inside a cricket bag—anything can trigger it.”
She pulled out a copy of “Thirst,” a poetry collection by Mary Oliver, which she reads to clear her thoughts before scenes. She flipped to a favorite poem. “Let me / keep my mind on what matters, / which is my work, / which is mostly standing still and learning to be / astonished,” she read, then looked up. “To me, that’s what it means to do what we’re doing.”
When I returned the next day, Coon was kneading sourdough on a marble kitchen island. “I’m definitely the beneficiary of her nesting impulses,” Letts said, eating banana bread that she had made the day before. “But he’s earning the money,” Coon said, leaving the dough to rise. “We’re in a very traditional marriage right now.” She grabbed a bottle of water and a ChapStick and led me outside. For Chicago in January it was relatively warm, so we walked to the 606, a nearby park converted from an elevated rail—Chicago’s answer to New York’s High Line.
Coon had hinted that her domestic idyll was more fraught than it appeared, and as we walked she explained why. In November, soon after “Mary Jane” closed, she had gone in for her twenty-week ultrasound. She was also screened as part of a scientific study, and a blood test revealed that she had been exposed to cytomegalovirus, or CMV—a common virus, often spread by small children, that can have drastic consequences if a woman contracts it for the first time while she is pregnant. An amniocentesis showed that the fetus was also infected. The doctors informed her that there was a ten per cent chance of birth defects, including brain damage or microcephaly, and a twenty-five per cent chance of serious hearing loss—but there would be no way of knowing if the baby would be affected until the birth. She and Letts were advised that termination was an option.
“We sat with that, just to see what it would feel like,” Coon recalled, walking along the path. She considers herself a “recovering Catholic,” and her father’s family is vocally antiabortion. But that wasn’t the issue. “He was already so much a person, and so much a part of our lives, that we couldn’t really contemplate that,” she said. She began thinking of her unborn child as a protagonist facing an obstacle. “Suddenly, there’s a person with a struggle going on. The story of his life became very tangible for us.”
The doctors offered Coon an experimental treatment, an infusion of an immunoglobulin that is typically used to treat hepatitis C and to prevent disease after organ transplants. The risks included preterm delivery and preeclampsia, but Coon decided to go ahead. Several weeks later, another ultrasound showed a potential complication in the fetus’s bowel, indicating that the virus was active, and she arranged a second infusion. “Even though it was irrational, I was feeling really guilty, because I wasn’t able to protect myself or my baby from this freak thing,” she said.
For the moment, Coon was turning down job offers, including a part in a miniseries that was being shot in Australia. She had no idea when she would act again. She often thought about her last role, as Mary Jane, a woman whose life is upended by her child’s special needs. Coon had found out that she was pregnant right before rehearsals began, and during the run she had spent months contemplating what she called the “interesting middle space” of Mary Jane’s life: scheduling medical appointments, making the best of things. “You get up the next day and that’s your life,” Coon said. “And that’s your kid, who’s whole and perfect to you.” Now that life was imitating art, she said, “I realize I didn’t actually go as far into that investigation as I thought. So I’ve had more work to do about accepting this outcome and the unknown of it.”
We walked off the 606 onto a busy street—Coon wanted to show me her favorite ramen joint. A man on the corner stopped us, waving pamphlets for the Special Olympics. “I’m advocating for kids with special disabilities,” he said. “Do you guys know anybody with any special mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities?”
Coon thanked him and took a pamphlet. As we walked away, she said, “Well, maybe.” She smiled to herself. “I may know someone really well.”
Coon traces her composure to her Midwestern upbringing. “I have three living grandparents in their nineties, just salt-of-the-earth, hardworking people who don’t complain about anything,” she told me. “And there is an inscrutability. There’s an emotional containment. The greatest expressions of joy or sorrow, they’re considered a bit uncouth or in poor taste, because you’re supposed to be able to handle anything that comes your way.”
In Copley, just west of Akron, the Coon name stretches back to the eighteen-hundreds. Carrie grew up on farmland that her ancestors owned at the turn of the century, before her parents repurchased it, decades later. The property still has the original smokehouse and the ruins of an old barn. Carrie’s mother, Paula, is a retired E.R. nurse. Her father, John, who is semiretired, now works in building maintenance at the Akron Art Museum. They grew up less than a mile from each other.
As a child, Coon had six acres to explore. She and her siblings would hunt for raspberry patches, play capture the flag, have mud fights near the pond. She has three brothers and a sister, Morena, whom her parents adopted from El Salvador when Morena was four and Carrie was three. Coon doted on her. “I was just desperate to make her into my image, teach her English and make her play with my toys, teach her how to be messy,” she recalled. Her father took them to church every Sunday, but did not force his religion on his children. After Carrie’s confirmation, he told her, “Figure it out. Decide what you want to be.”
Coon was an unassuming middle child: blond and boyish, sporty yet woefully uncoördinated. “She was just a normal kid,” her mother told me. “She wasn’t a standout in the family.” But she had a burgeoning desire to perform. “I always liked church,” Coon said. “I was one of those kids who was desperate for the statue of Mary to talk to me, which is a very egotistical approach to your faith. I just wanted somebody to pay attention to me.”
Another part of her turned inward. Before Coon was two years old, she had developed a habit of picking at her own skin, often until it bled. As a young child, she was “lightly disciplined” for it, she said, but her parents weren’t quite sure what to do. The problem became severe during adolescence and continued into high school, where she was the class president and the captain of her sports teams. “Outwardly, I looked very stable and very put together, very successful,” she said. “Whereas I was actually hiding a bunch of scarring and open sores, and my hair was falling out because it had transitioned to my scalp when it got really bad. And nobody knew.”
Coon took up acting in high school, after she auditioned for “Our Town” before soccer practice, already in her shin guards and cleats, and got the lead. Delivering the final speech for an audience, she recalled, “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.”
She was recruited to play soccer by Mount Union College (now the University of Mount Union), in Alliance, Ohio. “I was not very good in terms of my skill level,” she said. “But I was scrappy, I was really fast, and I was reckless with my body. So I became a sweeper, which is the last line of defense.” She changed her major about eight times. For a while, she wanted to be a linguist, but finally settled on English and Spanish literature, with a minor in psychology.
By then, Coon’s compulsive behaviors had worsened, and she was losing hours of each day to picking her own skin, which led to more problems: tendinitis from working at her scalp, swollen ankles that kept her out of soccer games. The emotional by-products were even more damaging. “My life was kind of disastrous at that time,” she said. “I was a really good liar.” The lying began as a cover for her compulsion—for instance, telling a teammate that a cut on her leg never seemed to heal because she had a blood disorder—but spilled over into her social life. For a year and a half, Coon had two boyfriends who didn’t know about each other, one in Akron and one on campus. She rationalized the deception as a form of altruism: “They obviously needed me around to help them, so how could I possibly leave either of them in that condition?” In her sophomore year, she fled to Spain for a semester abroad. When she returned, she came clean to both boyfriends and then fasted for three days, which she intended as a “reset button,” she said. She became so dehydrated that her mother took her to the hospital.
As she recuperated, her grandmother wrote her a letter. “It was about how I couldn’t understand how my mother was feeling, because until you have a child you cannot understand what it is to have your child be in pain and not be able to help them,” Coon said. “And that I was really hurting my mother. But she expressed it in such a compassionate way. And then she went on to tell me that pity is not the same as love. It was a beautiful letter about how to understand what love actually is. And that what I had been doing was clearly not about being in love with anyone.”
In college, Coon played Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but she didn’t consider applying to graduate acting programs until a drama teacher urged her to. She was accepted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, she began meditating and seeing a therapist and came to understand, she said, that her compulsion “was actually sort of an authenticity alarm that told me when my behaviors weren’t matching up with the way I felt or thought.” Acting classes helped her to recognize when she was blocking out an emotion. In speech class, she realized that her repression had manifested in her voice. She learned how to open up her breathing, her chest, her shoulders. For her graduate acting thesis, she wrote a paper on skin picking. “It’s actually a condition of absence,” she said. “It’s a withdrawing of self. And you can’t withdraw yourself if you’re going to be an actor.”
Coon is certain that her process of recovery made her a better actor: more self-aware, and also more intuitive about people’s seemingly irrational, self-destructive behaviors—for instance, Nora Durst’s urge to hire prostitutes to shoot her in the chest. “It’s obviously Nora’s way of resetting herself when she’s in intense pain,” Coon said. She knows about split psyches and the ways in which people deceive themselves and one another. Damon Lindelof told me, of “The Leftovers,” “Nora lost her mind three years before the show started, and we’re just watching someone who’s very good at pretending that she hasn’t.”
When Coon met Letts, he was sixteen years sober. “We knew that we wouldn’t judge each other,” she said. “Finally, it felt possible to be honest in a relationship.” On my final night in Chicago, Coon and Letts brought me to see a play at Steppenwolf. In 2016, Coon had appeared there in Letts’s play “Mary Page Marlowe.” The forty-four-year-old company, which launched the careers of such actors as Laurie Metcalf and John Malkovich, helped to define the Chicago theatrical style: ensemble-based, muscular, unpretentious. As an actor, Letts is often cast as bureaucrats and fathers, and, like Coon, he eschews sentimentality. Both of them espouse the grit and the craft of the Chicago school, and Coon mentioned with disdain the “presentational” style of New York stage acting.
In the lobby, theatregoers greeted them as a local power couple. “Busman’s holiday, eh?” one man asked Letts.
“People always say that to him, even when they think he’s John Lithgow,” Coon said, giving him an affectionate rub on the head.
After the play, we went around the corner to the Athenian Room, a homey Greek restaurant with low brick arches. The hostess welcomed the couple like old friends, gushing over Coon’s belly. “Next time you see us, we’ll need a high chair,” Coon told her.
We sat down at a small wooden table. “Carrie and I come here on our anniversary,” Letts said. They each ordered the chicken-Kalamata dinner, plus Feta cheese, and recounted their first meeting, at the callback for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” They were each seeing someone at the time, but, Coon said, “I think everybody recognized that we got on, and we would make each other laugh.” Their first date, after the play moved to Washington, D.C., was at Opening Day for the Nationals.
Before the show went to Broadway, in late 2012, the couple briefly separated. Coon recalled, “I had kind of said, ‘I know what I want. I want this, and I love you, and I’m really clear about it.’ And he was a little less clear for a minute. And I told him I’d have a really extraordinary life with or without him and walked away. It was the first time in my life that I had felt that clarity—which is how I knew it was real.”
They were together again by previews, and, on the night of the 2013 Tony Awards, when Letts won Best Actor in a Play and Coon was nominated for Best Featured Actress, they decided to get married. After registering in Illinois, they had sixty days to conduct the ceremony. They were working apart for most of that time—Letts on “Homeland,” and Coon on “Gone Girl.” Coon flew back from Los Angeles with one day left before the registration expired, but on the night that she arrived Letts was taken ill. They rushed to the hospital, where he had his gallbladder removed.
“So I brought the rings to the hospital,” Coon said. “I just thought, Well, I’ll see if there’s a chaplain in the house.” She recalled that she was wearing stretch pants and Letts’s T-shirt, and that Letts was “high as a kite in bed.” The chaplain, a Lutheran woman, “kind of talked us through a ceremony we don’t really remember,” she said. A few years later, they were cleaning out their closets and Coon found an old red T-shirt. “Tracy was, like, ‘That’s your wedding dress! Don’t throw that away!’ ”
A waiter brought them complimentary baklava, and they talked about acting together in Spielberg’s “The Post,” the Oscar-nominated film starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, about the Washington Post’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. Letts played Fritz Beebe, the chairman of the paper’s board, and Coon played the reporter Meg Greenfield. “It was noticeable how nervous everybody was,” Letts said, about working with Spielberg. “Meryl was scared. Tom was scared.” He bragged, of Coon, “She doesn’t get nervous. She says she does. She doesn’t. Not in the way the rest of us get nervous.”
In Coon’s big scene, she takes a phone call in front of the entire newsroom. “I kept turning the wrong direction, basically,” Coon said. “It was really simple: I had to look right and then look left, but I kept looking left and then right.”
“If I fucked something like that up multiple times, I’d be in my head about it,” Letts said. “She doesn’t get in her head about it.”
Coon, finishing her meal, added, “I learned that at Steppenwolf, too, because I could be really scared to be with you and Amy Morton. I just had to decide that I belonged there.”
Throughout the winter, Coon continued to get ultrasounds, to see doctors, to turn down roles. Her C-section was scheduled for March 19th. The week before, when she and Letts were at a matinée at Steppenwolf, she started having contractions. She figured it was a false alarm and went to bed. The next morning, she felt fine, and they went to the grocery store, where they bought a lot of meat to cook and freeze. There, the contractions began again. Back home, surrounded by thirteen pounds of raw chicken and beef, they called the doctor, who told them to come to the hospital right away.
In the moments after delivery, the baby didn’t make a sound. Then he groaned “like an old cat,” Coon said. He was immediately taken to the infant special-care unit for testing. It was nine hours before she saw him again. She described her medicated haze, how strange it was not to be pregnant anymore but also not to be holding her baby. Finally, the doctor came back and said that all the tests were normal: hearing, vision, liver function, brain scan. (The baby would still need regular hearing tests.) She and Letts held each other and wept.
Coon was recounting the story in late June, at a woodsy conference center in Briarcliff Manor, New York. She was a month into shooting Season 2 of “The Sinner,” a mystery series on USA. (The finale airs on September 19th.) Her maternity leave had lasted eight weeks. Letts had got an offer to play a policewoman’s father on “The Sinner,” and two weeks later Coon was asked to play the leader of a self-help commune, so they relocated to Manhattan. In the fall, Coon would fly to England to star in a movie with Jude Law—a psychological thriller called “The Nest,” about a married couple who move from the American suburbs to an English manor and spiral into despair. For Coon, who jokes that she’s at “the bottom of the A-list,” it was a step up. The script reminded her of the themes in “Virginia Woolf”: “If you let go of your illusions, can you survive?”
She was sitting in a cabin, amid bustling crew members, wearing a long brown wig and a cultish blue frock. Everyone on set was worried about ticks—Bill Pullman, who plays a detective in the series, had found one in his beard a few days earlier. On a break, Coon showed me baby pictures on her phone. “All our babysitters are practicing Buddhists,” she said excitedly. “He’s a super-chill baby.” The day of the first read-through for “The Sinner,” she and Letts had left him with a sitter for ten hours. “Everyone was, like, ‘You must be so sad and so stressed and so scared,’ ” Coon said. “I thought, I guess I’m supposed to feel that way. But I didn’t. I felt that he doesn’t care—he’s just sleeping and eating. And there’s a lovely woman there to make sure he’s safe. And I was O.K. And I felt guilty that I felt O.K., because all the mommy stuff you hear is about how impossible it is to leave them for the first time, and I just didn’t have that experience. Maybe because we’d been so scared for so long that now we felt we were over the terribleness. Anything else is, like, Oh, that’s nothing.”
She was called away to shoot a flashback scene, in which her character, Vera, introduces a new recruit to the commune’s former leader, a mysterious figure called the Beacon. The cameras rolled, and Coon led her scene partner to the cabin door, saying, “He’s on your side. Whatever he asks you, just be honest.” Coon delivered the line with the straightforwardness of a middle manager instructing an intern, but then, as she turned away, flashed a look of distant guilt.
The director called cut. “We’re losing your face,” she told Coon. “Would you mind playing it a little more toward the camera?” Coon had learned much of her film technique while shooting “Gone Girl.” At one point, the director, David Fincher, asked her for more “screen direction” and she didn’t know what that meant. Fincher, impatient, moved on, and the next day, Coon recalled, she told him, “You know that this is my first movie, and you knew that when you hired me. If I know what you’re asking me to do, I can do it.” (Fincher didn’t remember the conversation, but, he said, “she didn’t require a lot of teaching.”)
As night fell, a van drove Coon and the other actors down to a barn in a darkened field. They were about to film a harrowing scene in which Coon’s character is violently assaulted during a cult ritual. I wondered whether she needed a moment alone to brace herself, but she didn’t. “One of the things that’s interesting about being a mom now is there’s no time to prepare for work,” she said sunnily. In her trailer, a stylist adjusted her wig and asked, “What will your face look like when you’re raped?”
“I think it’ll be more still,” Coon said, and let her face go blank.
Under a starlit sky, crew members set up monitors in the mud. Fireflies blinked all around us. “That reminds me of home,” Coon said with a sigh, leaning back into a director’s chair. “My yard was full of them.” She urged me to look up at the moon. “I talk about it a lot,” she said. “I’m always, like, ‘Everybody look!’ And they’re, like, ‘That’s enough.’ ” Then she headed into the barn. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the season of “Fargo” in which Coon starred.
