Carrie Coon has built a career on under-the-radar performances that nevertheless should be counted among the best of that year—or any year, for that matter. This streak continues with Azazel Jacobs’ drama “His Three Daughters,” a story of at-odds sisters Katie (Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), who are caring for their sick father during his last days. As Katie, the most uptight of the siblings, Coon uses the character’s tendency to breathlessly talk at others as a defense mechanism; when that emotional dam breaks, it’s a master class in subtle emotion for any aspiring actor.
In our wide-ranging conversation, Coon discusses her creative process for Jacobs’ film and beyond, the importance of fine-tuning your technique, and why shooting “The White Lotus” Season 3 is an experience she’ll “be processing for a long time.”
Here are a few highlights:
When it comes to line delivery, Coon urges actors not to shy away from learning the technical aspects of the craft.
“Maybe that’s uncool now. But I’m coming from the theater, where sometimes you have to fill a 1,100-seat house, or you have to make something feel intimate, but everybody still needs to hear you. Those are technical skills. And I feel that a lot of young actors, maybe because there isn’t as much regional theater, or for whatever reason—I don’t know that they’re learning those skills in the same way.
There are lessons you learn in the theater [when] repeating a performance eight times a week and making it feel like the first time. Some of that’s super technical, because it’s not there for you all the time. But the important thing is not that you cry, it’s that they cry. Film can see that inauthenticity in a way that you can hide in the theater. It’s in your eyes. So having that technique is important.
I think for some people it’s a real turnoff—especially if they’re actors and they go: ‘Well, that feels like technique to me.’ Maybe it does. It was the best I could do on the day to execute what I was being asked. But it’s good to have the capacity to do it. That’s why I think it’s important to watch yourself. If you’re not willing to watch your work because you’re self-conscious, I mean, I’ve got bad news: You’re going to get old and die anyway. You might as well get over it now. Practice. If you can’t identify what those automatic choices are that you default to, then you can’t make other choices.”
She has a process for emotional scenes that has helped her become one of the best onscreen criers in the business.
“As far as things like ‘The Leftovers’ and big moments like that where I’m crying on camera, the one thing I think about more than anything else on a day like that is death. And I’m not kidding.
There feels like a lot of pressure mounting on a day when you’re delivering a big cry. I always found that if I was able to stop and really look around the room, at the crew—who’s not really looking at you because they have jobs to do—and think to myself: That person was a baby. They were born and they grew up. It’s not a long thing. I’m not talking about some long, involved process. You just say: All these people were babies, and now here they are, on this day, doing their best; and then someday, maybe not too distant from now, they will all be gone and I will also be gone. And there’s something so real and truthful and vulnerable about that, that makes all the other shit drop away for me. This moment will never happen again, and I never ever fail to be moved by that. If you really take in how extraordinary it is that you’re all in this moment at all—it maybe sounds corny or sounds like a trick; but I think the work is to really sit with that, your mortality or whatever. And then usually there’s a path from that into the thing that you have to do.”
“His Three Daughters” Courtesy Netflix
At this stage of her career, Coon has found freedom in failing.
“The benefit of getting older in any job, probably—and as a woman in particular, for me, it started when I was 30—is when you start to deeply understand how little anyone else is actually thinking about you. When that self-consciousness drops away, that’s when things get really exciting.
I had read an interview with Vicky Krieps, the German actress, who [said]: ‘When I start out to do a scene, I think, how wrong can I go?’ And I just love that, because if I can get really far away from it and just feel how that’s not it, then it’s just the act of experimenting and getting closer and circling it. But while you’re circling it, you’ve tried all these things before you get to the moment. Now, do we always have time to do that? No, probably not. But we can sure take a big swing and learn. And just being willing to be bad, I think, is really important.
My life fell into place. I found my partner, who will be my partner forever, presumably; I have my children—which I have found [motherhood] to be a very deeply creative act, and I really like being a mother, which has been clarifying. But how I make decisions about what work I’ll do has become very stark for me. There’s a lot to be gained inside of that mess that is motherhood. So now I’m a person who’s trying to balance what it’s like to try to be a mom and be an artist, and it’s really hard. It’s a really hard thing. But my psychological health is better than it’s ever been. I’m a more wholly integrated person; and I really, if I may say, just don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks. And that’s liberating.”
Shooting her upcoming role on “The White Lotus” was both a “bucket-list” experience for her and something that left the cast “unmoored.”
“I always loved the show ‘Enlightened.’ I own ‘Chuck & Buck.’ So I’ve been a fan of Mike White’s for a really long time. We had a meeting a number of years ago; I’m sure he doesn’t even remember it. He was one of the filmmakers I’ve always wanted to work with. So, in that regard, [‘The White Lotus’] was a bucket-list item, for sure. He has such compassion for every single character. Like any good writer, they’re all really him on some level. And he’s one of those directors—you come away believing he could play any of the characters better than whoever’s playing them. One day we asked him—we were like: ‘How does this person dance? Now do this person; now do this person.’ And it was extraordinary to watch him channeling each of those characters. So the real gift of it was working with Mike. He’s a really special filmmaker.
He’s got a great sense of humor. He’s very open. It’s not so rigid. The language is good, and you shouldn’t change it—don’t go improvising around Mike White. But he’s also throwing things at you and finding the humor and really selecting for performance. So you feel that if Mike says he got the thing he needs to build the scene, then he got it. So that’s a nice way to [know] that you left it on the table, sufficient enough that Mike White can cut together a good episode of ‘The White Lotus.’
But being on location is wild anyway. People get really unmoored. And we were in Thailand for six months; we were really far away from home. I did that longest flight in the world more times than I would like to count because I was commuting home to see my kids. It’s just a particular social experiment to be working on themes of death and spirituality in a Buddhist country with an international cast just really, really far away from our lives. You’re stepping out of the rhythm of your life to do this. It’s something I’ll be processing for a long time. And I haven’t had a lot of time [to process] because I was on ‘The Gilded Age’ set 48 hours later, so it was a really intense year, in a good way.”