Actor and writer Tracy Letts ‘ having the time of my life’
NEW YORK — If you want to get Tracy Letts in your movie you’d better proofread the script before you send it.
Letts, who has supporting roles in Lady Bird and The Post, is also a Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Awardwinning playwright and says he has abandoned new scripts after 20 pages if they torture the English language.
“If I get a script that has a lot of bad grammar, a lot of typos, then I think, ‘ Well, they probably didn’t work real hard on making the script good,’ ” he said. “So that’s big for me.”
His instincts seem to have worked out marvelously over the past year, with two celebrated films, his play, The Minutes, about to land on Broadway, another play — Mary Page Marlowe — coming off- Broadway this summer, and a role in HBO’s Divorce, now in its second season.
His busy schedule is about to magnify — and permanently: Letts and wife, Carrie Coon, who is having her own breakout moment thanks to roles on The Leftovers and Fargo, are welcoming their first child this spring.
“People keep telling us our lives are going to change. I don’t believe ‘ em,” said Letts, 52, displaying his dry sense of humour. “No way. No chance. How could it possibly change my life?”
Letts burst to international fame when his August: Osage County won the Pulitzer and five Tonys, including the bestplay trophy in 2008.
He returned to Broadway in a 2012 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and had two good things happen — he met his wife doing the show and one of Homeland’s creators saw him in the play, kick- starting his latest screen career with a story arc as a CIA director.
Soon he was in Todd Solondz’s Wiener- Dog, which also starred Greta Gerwig, the author of Lady Bird, a coming- of- age tale about a teenage girl in her last year of high school in 2002.
Laurie Metcalf, who worked with Letts for the first time as his onscreen wife in Lady Bird, said working with him was one of the draws.
“I knew he would be a real rock in all the scenes I have with him,” she said. “I’ve told him I love his style of acting. It’s very minimalistic. Very direct, very quiet. No kerfuffle. I like that.”
The Post, in which Letts plays a trusted adviser to Washington Post publisher Kay Graham, came together fast. The timely story about publishing the Pentagon Papers forced director Steven Spielberg and actors Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep to accelerate their normal film schedules.
“We did absolutely feel an urgency. There was a civic- mindedness about all of our approaches to the film,” he said. “We all had a reason to be there.”
The pitched politics of today also infuses Letts’ The Minutes, a play about members of a smalltown city council meeting working out their differences over 90 minutes.
“The play isn’t about Donald Trump and it’s not about Hillary Clinton. It’s not about Democrats or Republicans, though it does present a couple of different political philosophies in the mouths of characters,” he said.
To get ready to write, Letts endured watching hundreds of hours of civic meetings on YouTube. “If you’re struggling with insomnia, I’ve got a surefire solution to that problem,” he joked.
His success does leave him in a bit of a pickle when it comes to the Oscars: Where will he sit on the big night? At the Lady Bird table or the one for The Post?
At the Golden Globes, he avoided both films and instead sat with his wife at the Fargo table.