Killer Joe

…1991 Letts wrote the play Killer Joe, about a Texas family that enlists the titular murderer-for-hire to kill a relative with a sizable life insurance policy. The script was so graphic and violent, however, that no theatre company would agree to produce it. Two years later Letts and a few…

Letts’s darkly violent Off-Broadway comedy Killer Joe, which, along with her appearance as a young lesbian in the HBO movie If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), indicated an affinity for provocative independent-minded fare. A string of roles in nonmainstream films followed, including leads in the coming-of-age tale Me Without…

…in Letts’s ultraviolent black comedy Killer Joe. Three years later Shannon took on the part of Peter Evans, a Persian Gulf War veteran who believes that his blood is infested with insects, in Letts’s dark love story Bug, which debuted in London. Both roles secured his notoriety for playing characters…