Carrie Coon on Broadway’s ‘Bug,’ ‘White Lotus’ Memes, Reading the Reviews, and Longing to Be an Action Hero

I have to ask, since I’m looking at my Blu-ray collection now and I know that you and Tracy are big champions of physical media: What’s your media diet while you’re in the show?

Normally, if I’m home, Tracy and I watch a movie every night. We watched Bacurau last night; Tracy’s presenting an award to the filmmaker [Kleber Mendonça Filho] and we hadn’t watched it yet and always try to do our due diligence. Tracy picks everything, that’s our arrangement. I go downstairs, I have no idea what we’re watching, and then he puts something on and I watch it—which is, for me, as somebody who has to make a lot of decisions in a day, a very liberating thing. But now that I’m doing the show, I stay in the city once it’s over at 10. So when I’m alone, I can’t make any decisions, let alone turn on the television in a hotel or an apartment that’s unfamiliar to me. It never works, so I give up. I totally give up and I just read my book. Right now I am reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and I’m reading a book that’s in galleys that they’re asking me to do the audiobook for, by an author that I really love.

I sort of struggle with my Blu-rays–

Because of storage?

Storage, and everyone says everything is streaming. But, going back to the paranoia of this play–

Yes, you will not have access anymore. It’s a huge part of our [collecting]. We probably are up to 13,000 now. We get DVDs every day. Tracy gets them delivered every day and there is stuff we have that I don’t think people will ever see again, stuff that won’t ever be available to the public for streaming ever again. There are gatekeepers. Whenever there are gatekeepers, you’re going to have limitations, and Tracy doesn’t want to have a limitation. He doesn’t buy sports cars, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t do drugs, he doesn’t buy clothes, so it’s fine. That’s his one vice, and it’s pretty innocuous.

As someone who straddles stage and screen, are you completely the other way about stage performances, in that they should remain ephemeral?

Yeah. I mean, look, I believe anything that gives people access is pretty special and pretty important. Tracy and I both grew up in small towns. If we didn’t have movies, we wouldn’t know Virginia Woolf. That’s why Tracy has always been positive about having his plays adapted to film, even though it’s hard and doesn’t always translate. He believes in it because some little kid in Oklahoma might see something and be inspired by something they wouldn’t normally have access to.

A film rather than a recorded performance of a play?

Yeah, of course. When the pandemic happened, the only way to access live performance was if it was recorded and cast widely. For people who are immunocompromised or have accessibility issues, that’s actually a really important thing, to have access to culture. When my son was two during the pandemic, he hadn’t had screens up until that point and one of the only things we let him watch was orchestras and ballet, because that was the only way to see that stuff. There’s something to be said for recording live performance and making it available. They did that amazing screening of Good Night, and Good Luck which David Cromer directed, and so many people watched that. That’s really powerful. It’s still a collective experience, so I’m not against it. It is a different medium; I don’t think it entirely translates, and nothing compares to having an experience in a room with other people.