Carrie Coon

Carrie Coon (born January 24, 1981, Copley, Ohio, U.S.) is an American stage, television, and film actress known for her roles in the television series The Leftovers (2014–17) and The Gilded Age (2022– ), the third season of The White Lotus (2025), and the Ghostbusters film franchise. Coon has received nominations for Emmy, Golden Globe, and Tony awards.

Early life and education

The third of five children, Coon grew up in Copley, a town close to Akron, Ohio. Her mother worked as a nurse, and her father managed the family auto-parts store. Coon was first inspired to pursue acting when she saw the play Babes in Toyland at age 10, but her mother’s schedule as a nurse prevented her from taking Coon to auditions. Apart from a high-school production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, she did not seriously pursue acting until she attended the University of Mount Union, where she majored in English and Spanish while getting involved in theater. She then attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison on a full scholarship, receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in acting in 2006. She worked as an apprentice at the American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin, filmed commercials, did motion-capture work for video games, and recorded voice-overs for Midwest-based companies.

Acting career onstage and on-screen

Coon performed with the Madison Repertory Theatre in 2006 in Our Town, the same play she’d appeared in during high school. Her work with the American Players Theatre continued until 2009 and included plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 2008 she appeared in a production of Brontë, staged by the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company in Chicago.

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Coon’s big break came in 2010 when she was cast in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. The New York Times lauded her performance, writing that Coon “imbues the sozzled Honey with a sweet sympathy and a hint of a backbone.” The production also brought Coon a life partner in the form of costar Tracy Letts, a playwright and actor known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County. Both Coon and Letts remained with the production when it moved to Broadway in 2012 and were nominated for Tony Awards for their performances, with Letts winning for best actor. The couple married in 2013 and spent a few years together in Chicago. By 2017, however, their careers necessitated more time outside the Midwest, and by 2023 they had relocated to a home in Brooklyn and another residence in Bedford, New York. They have two children.

Coon made her screen debut in a 2011 episode of the TV series The Playboy Club and continued with a few more one-episode roles in series such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Ironside. But her breakout role on-screen came when casting director Ellen Lewis saw Coon in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway and asked her to audition for HBO’s The Leftovers (2014–17), a series based on Tom Perrotta’s dystopian novel of the same name. After Perrotta and show cocreator Damon Lindelof watched Coon’s audition tape, they had what Perrotta later described to the entertainment website Vulture as a “feeling of instantaneous recognition.” To them Coon immediately embodied the character of Nora Durst, whose family disappears in a Rapture-like event; Coon was offered the part based on her audition tape alone.

The roles kept coming: Coon’s first feature film appearance was as a bar-owning sister of Ben Affleck’s character in Gone Girl (2014). She also played a Minnesotan police chief in the third season of the TV series Fargo (2017), for which she received an Emmy Award nomination, and an adoptive daughter of the supervillain Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War (2018). In 2021 she starred as Callie Spengler in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the fourth film in the Ghostbusters franchise, sharing screen space with Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, and Paul Rudd, before reprising her role in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024). She also starred alongside Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne in the critically acclaimed film His Three Daughters (2023).

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Coon told The New Yorker in 2018 that her “family was always wondering why [she] ended up playing people who were mentally ill, insane, downtrodden, and a little crazy.” Those types, she observed, reflected what was available for women in film and television. “Most female parts are written basically as hysterical women,” she said. “We’re always trying to fit women’s stories into this male structure…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.” Within a few years, Coon would gain widespread recognition for playing women with strong voices. She plays Bertha Russell in HBO’s The Gilded Age (2022– ), an 1880s period drama helmed by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. Russell, a fictional counterpart to Alva Vanderbilt, wields her husband’s new railroad fortune to gain acceptance into an old-money society. In 2025 Coon portrayed Laurie Duffy, a divorced New York lawyer on holiday with her two childhood friends in the third season of the TV anthology series The White Lotus. She earned Emmy nominations for The Gilded Age in 2024 and 2026 and for The White Lotus in 2025.

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