‘Nest’ actress on building a quarantine life
To become an actor is to become a risk management specialist without really trying. To remain an actor in the middle of a pandemic means graduating to crisis director of your own life.
“Certainly November’s going to be a big decider, as they say in politics, about what the future of our country looks like,” says Carrie Coon. The stage veteran is a Tony Award nominee and frequent film and television presence thanks to “The Leftovers,” “Fargo” and “The Sinner.” For some, “Gone Girl” (2014) put her on the map. For others, she was on the map long before that.
“It’ll probably determine whether we can get this pandemic under control,” she says. “We have no national leadership right now, so how are we ever going to come back? I mean, theater’s going to be last to come back. Meanwhile 98 percent of the people I know are unemployed. And they’re probably going to lose their health insurance.”
Coon co-stars with Jude Law in “The Nest,” the second feature by Canadian writer-director Sean Durkin, opening in limited release Friday before going online Nov. 17. The style of this tense, absorbing drama, set in the mid-1980s in America and England, will be familiar to anyone who admired Durkin’s 2011 debut film, “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” about one woman’s seductively nightmarish experience in a rural New York state cult.
In “The Nest,” Coon’s character, Allison, has a teenage daughter from a previous marriage and a 10-year-old son with her nakedly ambitious commodities broker husband, played by Law. A move back to London, and to an cavernous manor in Surrey, puts this precarious couple further out on an invisible limb.
Filmed before the coronavirus pandemic, “The Nest” seems to suit these times, Coon says. “We’re all in isolation now, and everyone’s coming up against the tacit agreements in their marriages and having to reexamine them in quarantine.” Durkin and company made the indie, which found plenty of admirers at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
For the past six months Coon, 39, and her husband, actor and playwright Tracy Letts, have been home in Chicago. (Letts’ play “The Minutes” was previewing on Broadway in March when everything stopped.) Coon is on the move this fall, first to New York for preproduction on the HBO series “The Gilded Age,” then home, briefly, then west to Los Angeles for some special-effects-driven reshoots on “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” then home again, then a drive east to start filming “The Gilded Age.”
How does she feel about traveling these days?
“Well,” Coon says, “Tracy’s in a high-risk group; he’s a 55-yearold man. So for us the stakes feel pretty high. No job is worth bringing home a virus that could kill my husband, you know? But I’m finding that the communication between (‘Gilded Age’) production and the union and the actors has been really very transparent.
“And I feel certain that if I feel unsafe I can raise my hand about it, and it’ll be dealt with. But, yes, it’s intimidating. We’re going to be one of the first productions back in New York City, and nobody wants to be a guinea pig.”
It’s a new era for working actors, Coon speculates.
“So much depends on building rapport in the hair and makeup trailer, in the casual contact at the craft services table,” she says. “That’s all part of what building a company on a set is about. And we don’t have that contact anymore. I don’t know how it’s going to feel to actually do this work without the sharing of space and time.”
On Twitter, succinctly, @carriecoon hashtags her film viewing via #Quarantinelife.
“The Way I See It”: Longtime White House photographer Pete Souza is the focus of this documentary from director Dawn Porter who made a splash earlier this year with “John Lewis: Good Trouble.” 100 minutes. PG-13 (profanity)
“This is Tracy’s dream,” she says, laughing. “He hasn’t been home much the last five years, he’s been working so much. But he’s amassed this astonishing collection of DVDS and now he finally gets to watch them.”
Among her own recent favorites: “I really loved ‘Klute.’ And ‘Zama’ — such a fever dream of a film. Paul Schrader’s ‘Blue Collar’ — what a film to see now, when the haves and the havenots in this country are so far apart.”