“It’s absurd. It’s untenable,” she says. “We’re in a really precarious moment because people’s lives are untenable all across the board.” She recognizes her own privilege—that she and her husband are both able to work, that they can afford childcare—but says she’s worried for actors who can’t find roles in this shrinking economy. “Even just the labor of making tapes, the free labor, there’s no protection,” she says. “We have these rules in our union, but no one’s really following those rules. What young actor is going to make that phone call and complain?”
She’s also noticing how few female-centered films get told on the biggest stages, with the biggest budgets. “What happens when you’re living in an authoritarian regime is everybody gets scared, and everybody gets safe, and everyone’s making really safe choices. It’s not what people want,” she says. “Women are tremendous economic drivers in this economy, and we still aren’t making art for them.”
Coon will do her part, with films like The Liberation. She’s wrapped work on another independent movie, Honeymoon/Funeral, a romantic comedy from Fresh Off the Boat creator Nahnatchka Khan that also stars Rebecca Ferguson and Greta Lee. Next year, Letts heads to London from April through October to do Death of a Salesman at The National, which means more maneuvering for their family unit. “We’re thrilled for him. And yet that’s going to be a really interesting time for our family,” she says. “So I don’t have as much work lined up, and I’m okay to be patient. I feel good about being patient right now.”
But she does have one wish for the future: She’d like to do a comedy. “No one’s letting me do that. My family is surprised by my career because it’s just not the way I occurred to them as a person at all. People are expecting to meet a very serious and lugubrious actress that needs a lot of special drinks or something,” she says. While taking another sip from her custom, off-menu ginger tea.
